Dishme is a Sydney based start-up which promises to revolutionise the way you eat by connecting you with passionate cooks in the neighbourhood to get fresh, healthy and homemade food cooked as per your taste and dietary requirements.
Even though the importance of eating well is widely known, busy lifestyles lead people not to face proper nutrition as a priority in their lives. Dishme believes the so called healthy food available in restaurants and takeaways is frequently not appetising enough and, even worse, not really healthy; it is over salty, over sauced and over rich.
According to Dishme, same happens with processed food available on the supermarket shelves. In the ideal world, cooking your own food would be the obvious solution, but we all know that the lack of time and/or skills will get in the way of it.
In 2015, Dishme CEO Pushpinder Bagga found himself struggling with his health by the combination of a poor diet and long work hours. Taking that as a wakeup call, he decided to ask the community for help. In a matter of days, he got multiple responses from home cooks living nearby offering fresh, homemade meals. After three months of wholesome food, his health improved considerably and the idea of launching a platform to help many others like him was born, with the simple mission of making fresh, healthy and homemade food accessible for everyone in the world.
Around 60 per cent of adults and one in four children are overweight or obese, and the National Health and Medical Research Council predicts that by 2025, 83 per cent of men and 75 per cent of women will be overweight or obese if current trends continue.
Dishme, just recently launched, is the world’s first online marketplace to get (or be) an on demand personal cook for fresh, healthy and homemade food based on customer’s taste and dietary requirements. It promises to revolutionise and facilitate the whole aspect of eating/cooking, offering real, wholesome, tasty food made from scratch to hungry and healthy conscious people and at the same time provide the opportunity to build a home business to capable home cooks who want to earn an extra income. Unlike typical businesses, who base their profit in profiting off customers, Dishme prioritises the uniqueness and individuality of each customer by connecting them with local cooks by sustainable, healthy, limitless and efficient food.
Dishme hands you back two hours of every day lost to the daily burdens of the shopping, cooking and cleaning process.
The ordering process starts with customers registering with a simple sign-up process, configuring their personal food preferences and diet requirements. Next, they determine the number of meals, when and where they want it delivered. No time is wasted choosing what to eat as it is the cook’s responsibility to plan and offer a menu that meets their preferences; just like a personal cook.
Currently, the cooks deliver the food themselves and will continue to do so as the business grows. The idea for the future is to partner with third-party logistics companies to organise the deliveries.
The cooks also register with a simple sign-up process, followed by a rigorous vetting process which includes a personal interview, taste check, kitchen inspection and food safety certification. Only those who embrace and commit in adopting the business values are selected. At the moment there are more than 210 cooks on the Dishme portal.
The global takeaway food and delivery industry is $130 billion and in Australia it’s $16 billion with a growth rate of 10%. It is the plan of Dishme, in the next 3 years, to target 3.6 million busy urban professionals in Australia between the age of 25-40 who eat out 3-4 times per week.
So far, Dishme has researched the market, trialled four different business models with paying customers, made first revenue from an average order size of $50 and raised $100,000 from H2 Ventures.
The company boasts an incredible team of founders, advisors and interns with years of experience, but more importantly a strong passion for Dishme. The core team is composed of CEO Pushpinder Bagga, CIO Simran Gambhir (former Flybuys CTO), Lawyer Richard Fleming (former Flybuys Chief Legal Advisor), CTO Eric So (developed apps ranked top 10 in Australia), CFO Matthew Tribe and the advisors Merrill Pereyra (former Dominos CEO), and Maysoon El-Ahmad (former Woolworths Head of Customer Insights).
