When it comes to online businesses, the possibilities are truly endless. You can transform your passion into a thriving business without substantial monetary and time investment from the comfort of your home. One such viable business venture is an online tiffin delivery business that involves delivering packed meals to your customers at a fixed time every day. There are two ways to set up an online tiffin delivery business; you either prepare the food yourself and deliver it to customers or put together a tiffin marketplace to aggregate other tiffin services and handle the delivery.
Before we look into how to start an online tiffin delivery business, let’s look at why it’s a great option in the current on-demand business landscape.
Why Start an Online Tiffin Delivery Business?
- Growing Demand: Homemade food has become a necessity for working professionals, students, and anyone else who isn’t home for a good part of the day. While canteens are available in most workplaces and schools, they don’t offer food that should be eaten every day. This growing requirement for home-cooked food has made tiffin delivery businesses quite famous.
- Timed Management: With a tiffin delivery business, you can provide freshly prepared, nutritious meals to people at a fixed time every day. It can make managing the business much easier since you have a schedule to follow and plan your food preparation and deliveries accordingly.
- Exciting Profit Margins: When it comes to food, most people don’t mind paying a little if they get high-quality meals that use fresh and premium ingredients. Your online tiffin delivery business can enjoy significant profit margins if you plan your expenses well and ensure your orders’ smart delivery.
- Hassle-Free Setup: Like most online businesses, a tiffin delivery business is relatively easy to set up given you have the right tools and software. Depending on the business model you’re going for, you can have your online tiffin delivery business up and running in less than a week.
Things to Consider When Starting an Online Tiffin Delivery Business
Registration and License
No business can start without first registering with the designated government body and then obtaining the proper licenses required to run a business legally. Once you decide to take the plunge and start your online tiffin delivery business, you’ll need to register the name of your tiffin business. Next, you need to apply for a catering license, which will then be issued once your office and kitchen are thoroughly inspected and are deemed to comply with the state’s food and sanitation requirements.
Ensure Your Business
Your online tiffin delivery business needs to be insured against any potential damage, theft, or any other unanticipated circumstance. Your kitchen, equipment, and staff (if any) need a comprehensive insurance cover, and getting an insurance policy for your business is also mandatory under most laws.
Sourcing The Equipment
Food is the mainstay of your online tiffin business, and you need the right equipment to whip up tasty and nutritious meals for your tiffin service. You can go about sourcing equipment for your online tiffin business in two ways; renting/leasing or buying. Depending on your budget and initial investment, you can make a choice.
Menu Configuration
The next step in setting up your online tiffin delivery business is finalizing the menu. It would be best if you came up with a menu that utilizes your skills while addressing the demand and needs of customers you hope to service. You can either have a daily menu that features a decent mix of food that people would want to eat or an ala carte menu that people can choose from. Your online tiffin delivery business menu doesn’t need to be set in stone and can always change depending on customer feedback.
Pricing Your Online Tiffin Delivery Service
Any business can function only as long as it’s profitable and achieve significant profit margins, and you need to price your offerings smartly. While the food can have a base price, it’s delivery where you can room to play with the price. You can charge a higher delivery fee depending on the distance and time of delivery. Surge pricing during peak hours is also something to consider when setting your tiffin delivery service price.
Delivering Tiffins
As an online tiffin delivery business, you’re responsible not just for preparing scrumptious meals for your customers but also for delivering them promptly. To achieve this, you need to maintain a reliable delivery fleet that is equipped with the right tools to deliver tiffins on time. Tookan, an enterprise delivery management system, allows you to optimize your delivery operations with features like route planning, real-time tracking, automated dispatch, powerful geo-analytics tools, efficient integrations, and many more. When you partner with Tookan for your delivery management needs, you’re assured of a top-notch product equipped with the best-in-class features and an easy to navigate layout.
How to start the tiffin delivery business?
Now that you’re aware of everything you need to start an online tiffin delivery business let’s look at the how. The most crucial facet of your online business is the marketplace or online store through which customers can place their order or confirm their monthly subscription. Your online tiffin delivery store needs a marketplace that lists your services, their prices and allows customers to place an order.
Are you wondering how to build an online marketplace from scratch? Yelo can help. An online marketplace builder packed with all the tools and features you need to create an online store for your tiffin business, Yelo can help you launch an online marketplace within a day. Some features that make Yelo the ideal partner for your online marketplace creation needs are:
- Customizable and fully-responsive mobile apps and websites that allow customer ordering on the go
- Stunning marketplace themes that can be modified as per your requirements. You get to decide the look and feel of your online store.
- Organize your catalog in a detailed fashion with categories like type, season, veg/non-veg, sale, and much more.
- Robust inventory management that ensures you’re never out of products that are on-demand at a given time.
- Analytics that provide accurate data and findings to help you steer your business in the right direction.
- Set up shipping rates by fixed-price, tiered pricing, weight-based, and location-based rates.
- Use custom bots for your marketplace to engage with your customers and maintain consistency—set up your bot in a few clicks.
- Attract customer orders by setting discounts on specific products or for the entire product catalog and reward your loyal customers by offering loyalty points.
- Create attractive & insightful reports and dashboards with a simple drag-and-drop interface to uncover business insights.
- Safe and secure payment process that includes over 100 external payment gateways from around the world.
Creating an online tiffin delivery business is an exciting prospect full of great opportunities and more significant profit margins. Power your business with the right tools and give your entrepreneurial dreams the wings they need to soar.
Learn more about how Yelo and Tookan can help your online tiffin delivery business take off by getting in touch with our team of experts.
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