An Interview With Devendra Kamtekar Of FoodFeasts, A Service Which Brings Mumbai’s Most Iconic Food To Your Doors!

Mumbai is packed with legendary restaurants with iconic fare that are frequented by hundreds of customers each day. For Parsi food, for instance, there’s Ideal Corner and Jimmy Boy, while for South Indian fare there’s A Rama Nayak’s in Matunga. Equally popular are Chetana and Golden Star Thali for their thalis.

These restaurants are so popular that Mumbaikars will traverse across the city to enjoy a meal at their favourite restaurants. But…what if they didn’t have to? What if they could get the same iconic food delivered to their own doors?

Those are questions that Devendra Kamtekar, a former IT professional asked himself a year ago. As a working professional, he realised that his colleagues and himself were willing to travel quite a bit to enjoy food from said iconic restaurants like A Rama Nayak. What if, he thought, the same food could be sent over to offices and homes instead? And that’s how FoodFeasts was born – today it does just that.

Starting Steps

Kamtekar began approaching legendary restaurants, to suggest that they allow them to carry out delivery of their food. “When we started singing up restaurants I used to sign up one or two restaurants in a week. Now, I have brands that are synonymous and well known in the market,” Kamtekar says, recalling the start of FoodFeasts.

As well as establishing a connection with traditional restaurants that may not have been as open to delivery as newer ones would be, FoodFeasts had another major challenge to deal with; packaging. To ensure they were doing justice to such loved food, they had to devise packaging that would allow the food to stay hot and fresh as it was transported across the city.

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“We’ve been trying to involve a lot of packaging options…” says Kamtekar. “Packaging is a very exhaustive item to evaluate. Additionally the food is also very diverse. I serve everything from an authentic Parsi meal to medhu vadas and idlis and each has different requirements,” he adds.

Bringing The Traditional Into The 21^st Century

However, despite the focus on packaging, Kamtekar is quick to assert that FoodFeasts is not just another hyper local or even local delivery company. They also focus on helping the restaurants establish an online presence – an important survival factor in the food industry today.

“They’ve (the restaurants) have been in the business for 60-100 years. If we get them onto the portal we could benefit them, by making them more appealing to the millennials,” Kamtekar explains. When we ask just how FoodFeasts does this, Kamtekar adds “We give them social media exposure. We go to them, do a photo-shoot of the food items and convert them into marketable media. It creates a brand awareness for them and gets them more mileage.”

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The Future Of FoodFeasts

Now that they’ve established themselves and have comfortable relationships with the players in the traditional restaurant industry, Kamtekar sees a bright food filled future.

” We want to create an overall experience for consumers,” he says adding that they are looking at using their restaurant relationships to plan food walks and create online content that will benefit both the restaurants they work with and customers.

Additionally, Kamtekar hopes to take the concept of FoodFeasts pan-India in the coming months; so other cities should start thinking about what legendary eateries they’d like to see on the portal!

How It Works

Meanwhile, Mumbai foodies can head over to their website or download their app on Google Play to browse through the restaurants available and order. Within 45 minutes to an hour, the food will arrive at your doors!

Popular eateries on the portal aside from the ones we’ve already mentioned are Sarvi, Parsi Dairy Farm, Modern Lunch Home and RTI.

So, where are you ordering from first?