Most professionals have come home and felt too tired to cook – at least once in their lives, if not once a week. In those situations, it can be all too tempting to reach for that box of macaroni and cheese or order Chinese food online. Although admittedly easier than firing up the oven, those options just aren’t as good as a home-cooked meal.
Zomida, a startup linked to Harvard, will soon be making your dreams come true by offering on-demand homemade food from cooks within your community.
Inspiration from mom
The company’s founders, Amira Valliani and Subhadra Banda, met at the Harvard Kennedy School. And while they’re still finishing up their advanced degrees, they’ve laid most of the groundwork and done plenty of testing to make a Zomida a hit as soon as they launch in Boston, as well as Philadelphia.
Valliani gave me some background into how the idea for Zomida came to be: Typical college food and a mom were involved in the inspiration.
“The concept for Zomida came about when my mom was visiting me at school,” Valliani elaborated. “When she came, she saw the horrible things I was eating. She said to me, ‘I know you don’t have much time to cook for yourself, but there has to be a better way than this. There has to at least be people around here who can cook for you.’”
Valliani’s mother even took the unintentional steps to do some preliminary market research for Zomida.
“She went to Google to search for home cooks and actually found 10 or 12 of them, which she sent my way,” Valliani told me. “But they weren’t well sorted. I had no idea if they were good or bad cooks, if they were offering delivery or pickup only. They also didn’t have much diversity in the dishes they made.”
Talking it over with Banda, Valliani discovered that buying meals from people nearby is a thing in other parts of the world. It just hasn’t made its way to the U.S. yet, which fueled the founding team’s curiosity.
“Sub, my co-founder, is from India, where the concept of buying home cooked food is common,” said Valliani. “It got us thinking that maybe there’s an opportunity there.”
Finding the perfect business model
The two public policy students decided to test the waters of people possibly purchasing home-cooked meals, doing what Valliani described as “scrappy stuff.”
Zomida’s initial prototype involved finding student chefs who like to cook, stocking up on tupperware and dressing up the plastic containers with personalized stickers. The co-founders worked with the cooks to establish a set menu. The Harvard student body could then look at all of the homemade meal options and submit orders.
“We don’t serve anything on our website that we aren’t OK eating ourselves.”
For a month, Zomida did these trial runs, and transactions would be carried out at the student center. Valliani and Banda were astonished to see orders doubling week after week. Then they knew they were on to something.
Working out of the Harvard iLab this summer, the Zomida team focused on perfecting their business model before they relaunch to the general public.
“We recruited chefs any way that we could, and they ranged from caterers to my downstairs neighbor – a sweet empty-nester,” Valliani explained. “We determined that the best model was to have chefs post their own menus, choose their own prices and have the eaters decide what they wanted.”
That being said, they don’t let just anyone sell home-cooked food. Banda and Valliani do put every potential cook through a screening process.
“For vetting, we meet all of our chefs before they’re able to post any menus on the Zomida site,” Valliani stated. “We also do taste tests of their food beforehand to make sure it’s good quality.”
“We don’t serve anything on our website that we aren’t OK eating ourselves,” she said.
Impact...coming soon
I can’t think of a group of people who couldn’t benefit from Zomida’s services at one point or another. However, the startup saw the most response from one particular demographic during its testing phases.
“Out of all our customers, working parents were the most popular,” Valliani stared. “A ton of people out there have kids, are working really hard and the last thing they want to do is come home and put takeout Thai food or Chipotle on the table.”
“They don’t have time to cook, but frozen meals aren’t a good option and Blue Apron takes too long,” she continued. “They’d be ordering eight or nine meals at a time from us to get their families through the week.”
Soon enough everyone from college students to families will be able to order from Zomida. Banda and Valliani are working on making a polished website, securing more pre-seed funds and building a polished website – all of which they’re doing between classes. But the startup is expected to launch for good in March or April, so watch out for this culinary game-changer in the spring.
Image via Amira Valliani.
