Hopping Chef cornering a niche market for itself in the fine dining space

Hopping Chef, the in-house dining startup, has started on a promising note with orders flowing in from everywhere. Shaivlal Chandra, founder of Gritty Food which owns Hopping Chef, explained that the startup was born out of a need to have the best world cuisine created by chefs, right inside homes. The process is simple. One logs on to the web- site, picks up the cuisine and chef that one prefers. He added that “Every meal at Hopping Chef is very special and 100% tailor-made. We’ve done romantic dinners, house warming parties, game-viewing parties, personal celebrations and official lunches”. Gritty Food was also the official food partner of the recently-concluded India concert by Justin Bieber.

Started in 2015, the startup has the expertise to customize a meal for two or for a party of 15,000 with menu ranging from Oriental and Italian to South American and Japanese. It boasts of 60 chefs including the likes of Ajay Chopra, Pankaj Raut, Shantanu Gupte and Michael Swamy. Hopping Chef is also planning to roll out ‘Hop Box’, a chef-led multi-cuisine ready-to-eat meal box. The founder alluded that the ‘stay-at-home’ economy has arrived in the country. However, he also cautioned that the meal-kit and chef-interface based food models are at a nascent stage. And while companies engaged in this segment are trying to tap the latent demand, they will be hugely valuable if they can achieve a reasonable scale.