Foods for the Festive Season

[My guest post for 27coupons. Link here]

The Navratris have started and the Dusshera festivities have kicked off. With most of the shopping malls, Mom & Pop shops and e-commerce sites having fabulous discounts and deals going on, this is just the time to revamp your home and wardrobe. Check out the awesome coupons for your favorite sites here.

Justifying the ‘Incredible India’ tagline floated by the Ministry of Tourism, the festival which is celebrated in almost every corner of the country is observed in unique ways in different parts of the country. Be it the elaborate Pandals and light decorations of West Bengal/Odisha or the scintillating Dandiya/Ras garbha performances of Gujarat, each region has its own way of ushering in the Goddess. The Mysore Dusshera with its royal mustering and a grand elephant led procession are in no way less captivating than the grandiose Ramlila ( depiction of scenes from the life of Lord Rama and the final burning of the effigies of Ravan, Kumbhkaran and Meghnad ) of North India.

Lesser known but equally beautiful are the Golu dolls ( also known as Bommai Kolu or Bommala Koluvu or Bombe Habba) of South India. These wooden or porcelain dolls are used to depict the stories from the epics. While the more traditional ones stick to dolls of deities and demons, the contemporary artists also create dolls depicting musicians, couples dressed in traditional clothes, farm scenes, lavish weddings, cricket matches, etc. However, the God of wealth, Kubera is a must have of all such displays. Unlike the more public festivities in other parts of India, Gola dolls are more of a family tradition. Some of the dolls displayed in such households have been handed down through generations and every year a few new ones are also added to their collection. ( For more details, click here)

Whether it is Lord Rama vanquishing Ravana or Goddess Durga slaying the demon Mahisasura, the festival symbolizes the victory of good over evil. But at the same time it is also the season which sends all foodies into a tizzy. Food stalls invariably pop up at every small and big celebration venue and become a major draw for people ( who obviously discount the hygiene factor ). Even the vrat ka khana or sweets which are laden with ghee and dry fruits, are enough for most folks to break all diet resolutions. In fact, lot of folks try to work out and lose weight in the first three quarters of the year only to gain it back in the last quarter (most of the major festivals/weddings happen around this time). Here are some popular Navratri recipes –

1. Sabudana Vada – Sabudana is rich in carbs which gives an instant energy boost. Quick to prepare and good to eat, it keeps one full for hours. This one is made with soaked sabudana (sago) and mashed potatoes dumplings deep fried in oil.

2. Sabudana Khichdi - It consists of almost the same ingredients as the sabudana vada but is lower in calories. Equally yummy.

3. Shakarkand ki subzi – A tangy preparation of sweet potatoes, this one is light on the stomach and easy on the palate.

4. Shakarkand ka halwa – Made with mashed sweet potatoes, milk and ghee, it is simple yet filling. One can skip/reduce the quantity of ghee used without compromising on taste.

5. Fruit Kebabas/Fruit Chaat – Low in calories but quite yummy. They are easy to make and nutritious too.

6. Kuttu ka dosa/Kutta ki puri – Kuttu or buckwheat is a popular choice among most folks who observe a strict fast (cereals being forbidden) during the Navratris. Being high on fiber and proteins, it is a good choice for folks who eat only one meal per day (after sunset). Also, it is gluten-free.

7.Rajgire ki Puri/paratha/thepla – Another popular item on the menu for those on a no-cereals diet. This one also happens to be gluten free.

8. Gajar ka halwa – It is hard to find a soul who can resist this deliciously fudgy and decadent dessert. For calorie conscious folks, try the Microwave version or the gajar ka kheer.

9. Raita – A cooling raita is a must when gorging on festive food. The good bacteria in the yogurt helps in digestion. Try the staple potato/cucumber/boondi ones or get adventurous with Singharas, sweet potatoes or even a fruit raita .

10. Makhane ki kheer – A light kheer made with puffed lotus seeds and nuts, it is easy to digest. For those for prefer the savory, makhana or fox nuts can also be cooked with paneer or green peas in a nuts based gravy.

11. Sundal - Made with boiled and lightly tempered pulses, this one is as healthy as it can get. No wonder, most South Indian folks swear by it.

Online Grocery Shopping Creating a Buzz (Guest Post for 27Coupons)

With grocery predicted to be a US$ 11 trillion market globally by 2018 (Reference) and India poised to overtake Japan as the third largest market by 2016 (after China and USA), it hardly comes as a surprise that every investor worth his salt (or shares) want a share of this ever mushrooming pie. But even the most hardcore of shopping fans or shopoholics as we put them, would concede that shopping for grocery is only marginally better than the proverbial pain in the ass. And this is where the new age grocers or e-grocers like Bigbasket, Zopnow, Aaramshop, Ezkart, etc step in. Helped by technology like real-time monitoring and predictive data analysis, they promise to take the pain and drudgery out of shopping for groceries through online grocery shopping.

Leading the pack is Bigbasket which has a presence in Bangalore, Hyderabad and Mumbai and plans to expand its operations to Pune and Delhi within the next six months. With over 12,000 products across categories like Fruits & Vegetables, Grocery & Staples, Bread Dairy & Eggs, Beverages, Branded Foods, Personal Care, Household, Imported & Gourmet, Meat, Frozen Foods, etc, it offers a customized shopping experience by allowing one to shop from his/her previous order or an online shopping list or even a smart basket which consists of the frequently bought products for the customer. This flexibility of choices certainly helps, when one is hard pressed for time or keeps shopping for the same items/products at regular intervals. Orders below Rs 1000 attract a delivery charge of Rs 20 while above Rs 1000, the delivery is free of cost. You can use theircoupons to use some of their current offers. Also, there is no minimum order value which comes a boon for folks who are hard-pressed for time. Bigbasket offers an option of 4 time slots in a day, starting from 7 am and stretching till 10 pm. Customers can choose a slot as per their convenience. With real-time tracking in place, the customers receive regular notifications about the status of their order via SMS. Customers also have the option to return/decline a particular product if they are not satisfied with it. COD (Cash on Delivery) is also available. No doubt online grocery shopping has picked up in various cities where they are serving.

Bigbasket has a delivery model which is very logistic intensive as they are involved in every step starting from the point the order is placed to the final delivery which happens at the customer’s doorstep. ‘Till the last mile’ is how V.S. Sudhakar, one of the co-founders of Bigbasket puts it. The company has recently raised Rs 200 Cr funding from VC firms Helion and Zodius Fund II with Avendus in the second round of its capital raising. With this move the less than 3 year old company reaches a 1000 Cr plus valuation. The founders plan to use it for expansion to 10 cities by end of year 2015 and acquiring cutting edge technology solutions that will help understand/predict consumer habits and improved online grocery delivery. According to a report in the Economic Times, the company has crossed an annual revenue of Rs 250 crore and are growing at 10 percent month on month. They currently execute over 5000 orders per day and have recently reached the milestone of one million delivered orders. The shrewd use of technology and the vast domain experience of the founders (they had previously launched Fabmall, the pioneer of online shopping in India in 1999. The ensuing dot-com bust made them convert it to a chain of 200 plus offline grocery stores in South India. They were later on sold to the Aditya Birla group and re-branded as ‘More.’) ensures that every order remains profitable.

Ever since I started shopping with Bigbasket (sometime in late 2012), I have seen them introduce innovative features and products on a regular basis. They have recently introduced a recipes section on their website on a pilot basis. The ingredients used in a particular recipe are clearly mentioned and linked to the page which lists out the various varieties and brands available. Quite an useful feature as it saves one valuable time and effort that would otherwise be wasted in searching for it. Add that to the guaranteed on-time delivery and the widest selection of products, I am now a Bigbasket convert.

Note: Image courtesy of Sira Anamwong at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Ordering Food Goes Online (Guest Post for 27Coupons.com)

Recently I was on a cleaning spree before the Ganapati festival. Changing the curtains, dusting out every nook and corner, giving away the old stuff in anticipation of the festive shopping, etc. If you are in the habit of reading in between the lines, you would wonder why I cannot entrust the domestic help with such mundane matters. Well it so happens that I am quite finicky about small things like people touching my stuff or worse moving it around. Personally I would prefer things in their natural state of disarray as I have left them to things arranged in an orderly fashion by others. And this style of management is made even worse by a toddler who has made it a ritual of throwing things around the house or still worse…stacking them in secret places that he has discovered.

It was during one such broom wielding spree that I discovered this neatly arranged stack of flyers in a forgotten corner of the kitchen cabinet. Belonging to various restaurants in and around Marathahalli, Bellandur and Kormangala, they had been painstakingly and enthusiastically collected by me akin to the manner in which kids collect stickers and tattoos. Their yellowing appearance was almost metaphorical, evoking sepia tinted memories of a bygone era when they had been in-disposable for ordering food from a restaurant. Whenever I was not in a mood to cook or some friends/relative decided to put in an appearance at the eleventh hour, I would frantically rummage through the lot and pick up a restaurant. The next step would be to call up the place and check if they delivered to our locality/apartment. As fate would have it, more often than not the designated delivery guy for our locality would have either fallen sick or taken off to his native. However on the rare occasions that I got lucky, the next step would be to check if a particular dish would be available on that day. A curt ‘No’ for an answer would set me back to square one but I duly persisted till I successfully hunted down a restaurant that home delivered the food of my choice within the shortest possible time.

But that was before I discovered FoodPanda (Coupons), Just-Eat (Coupons) and TastyKhana. Now one just needs to log in to their website, select the city and the locality and voila, all the restaurants that cater/deliver to a particular locality are listed in a matter of seconds. Additional filters allow one to narrow down the choice based on cuisine type, delivery time, and even minimum order value. Plus they display the individual restaurant ratings based on the customer reviews as well. Having their app on ones smartphones make it still simpler, allowing one to order on the go. One needs to pay either cash on delivery or opt for an online payment (which often translates into an additional discount or cash-back).

A recent report in the TOI pegs the food services industry at a Rs 2.5 trillion valuation which is set to reach a Rs 4.1 trillion figure by 2018. Rising salaries and dual income households are fueling the trend which is being fanned by a number of cookery shows/competition on television. Exposure to various international cuisines is whetting up the Indian appetite for experimentation. Indian are regarded as quite conservative when it comes to their food but this is now changing at a very rapid pace.

A win-win situation for both parties, the portals/websites offer a wider reach for the restaurants while their own revenues are driven by large volume sales. While Foodpanda and Just-Eat are established global players who have targeted major cities where a sizable section of the population has more disposable income per household and established eating-out habits, the Pune based TastyKhana might as well emerge as the dark horse in this race. It has partnered with the Jubilant Foodworks owned Domino’s Pizza in India. The association would enable TastyKhana.in to take online orders on its website for Domino’s Pizza across 158 cities in India with an option of COD and online payment. While the 158+ cities on its map include Tier I cities like Mumbai, Pune, Delhi, etc, it also takes home delivery to Tier III cities like Rourkela (Orissa), Manipal (Karnataka), Amravati (Maharashtra), Limbdi (Gujarat), Rongpo (Sikkim). With no major players catering to these cities, TastyKhana might have earned some customers for the keeps. Once the population of these cities get a hang of ordering food online, it is only a matter of time that more local restaurants jump on to the online bandwagon. And with industry pundits predicting that the future lies in Tier II and Tier III cities which is where the next wave of retail boom will take place, TastyKhana might be in for a windfall. I have my bets in place, what about you ?

Note: Image courtesy of Keerati at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The Changing Face of Indian Retail (Guest Post for 27coupons.com)

From Mom & Pop stores and kiranawallas to opulent malls to shopping from the comfort of the living room sofa, Indian retail witnessed a lot of flux over the last decade or so. A lot of it has to do with evolving technology and the changing demographic of the average Indian shopper. With apps that let you shop from almost everywhere ( the Flipkart TV Ads are a brilliant demonstration of this), the thirty something urban professional could not have asked for more. No more worrying about dodging the work deadlines, facing traffic snarls, facing the endless queues at the billing counters. E-commerce firms are paving the way for you to spend quality time with the family.

So do we ditch the existing brick and mortar stores ?? Hardly. For they have the credibility and the infrastructure to provide a holistic shopping experience. But they seldom offer the attractive pricing that one finds on the online shopping portals. In fact some of the smart ones among us have leveraged the pluses of each one and taken to trying out stuff for ourselves at the B&M outlets before purchasing them online at a discount. It is probably one of the reasons behind online entities reaching out to the customers in more than one ways. This is something that even the tech-savvy customer would appreciate especially when it comes to making a big ticket/high value purchase. And I can vouch for it even though I have been making online purchases ever since 2008. A sheer physical presence somewhat on the lines of the FabFurnish offline stores which are much smaller as compared to the regular furniture stores but allow the customer to touch and feel the product, helps to foster confidence and build the brand value in the long run. Another good example of providing the customer with a personalized experience would be the Chumbak kiosks.

For the existing retail entities, a collaboration between the brick & mortar stores and the e-commerce portals that gives both the brands an omni-channel presence and allows each to leverage the existing capabilities of the other. A very good example of this is the strategic integration between Zopnow and Hypercity retail chain stores. For the uninitiated, Zopnow is an online grocery and consumer product goods retailer that operates only in Bangalore. But the move will now allow it to expand to other cities where Hypercity already has a presence. It also sorts out the cold storage issues ( for F&V) that Zopnow had been facing for sometime and effectively reduces the wastage for Hypercity.

As a first hand customer of both entities, I am quite excited as I now get access to the whole range of fruits and vegetables, including the exotic/imported variety and cut vegetables from Hypercity delivered at my doorstep within 3 hours. It also gives me access to the delectable repository of cheese that one can only find at Hypercity. And being a food blogger, I cannot think of anything more exciting. Though the whole integration process is not seamless and I have faced a few issues while trying to place/modify an order, I am hoping that they can work it out over the next few months. Of course, I will keep visiting Hypercity at leisure and keep checking out their offline offerings. But it will not be a need based trip.

Given the tangible advantages/benefits of having an offline presence, many e-tailers have taken to expanding the network of franchisee brick-and-mortar stores. Firstcry, Healthkart and Lenskart are noteworthy names which are going that extra mile to give the customers a real feel of the products before buying from them. Quite interestingly, a large number of these stores are located in Tier II cities where the customer is still a bit wary of online shopping. For those e-tailers who cannot have a physical footprint, offering a fixed/limited number of free trials is the way to go. For example Lenskart offers a trial for up to five frames before the customer has to choose one. Another option is enabling a ‘Virtual Trial Room’ which enables the customer to upload a picture of himself/herself and try on the clothes/make-up before making a purchase.

Not to be left behind, Brick & Mortar retailers are also jumping into the online bandwagon. One of the interesting brands in this section has been Medplus (the pharmacy chain stores) which went the online route selling cosmetics and toiletries at Medplusbeauty.com. But they have now taken their pharmacy online. Check the site and you will find a lot of useful information like alternative medicines with the same composition, side effects, precautions, food restrictions, usage during pregnancy and a whole lot of medically relevant stuff. Definitely one of the most useful e-commerce that one can find.

Either ways, the brands should look at providing the evolving customer a seamless experience. Even it means over-hauling the existing infrastructure to give the customer continued support and connect. It is the only way to ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty,which ultimately translate into higher sales figures.

Note: In case you would like to get coupons of the websites mentioned in the blog post, you can go to 27coupons.com and search the same.

Ever Heard Of Pizza Economics? ( Guest Post )

My first guest post!! Feeling privileged to have Mr. Umakant Sharma write a piece for me.  An experienced writer, he has more than 6 years experience in online writing. He writes on mostly Food, health, Business and Education. Read on -

Last week I woke up with an incredibly awesome dream of a mouthwatering pizza with every bite bombarding my mouth with various flavors of yummy toppings. This was realization enough, that I had been suppressing my pizza craving from too long and nothing could stop me from having it as soon as possible.

I reached college determined to convince my gang of friends for a pizza party. Right when I was about to accomplish my mission, our economics professor entered and there was a disappointing murmur. Sensing the mood, the professor proposed a brilliant idea of ordering the pizzas in the class and enjoy the working bites. The concept was new for us and we loved it. This was when I knew God’s also loved pizzas.

The lecture started and surprisingly the professor was innovative enough to teach the pizza way. I could not believe what was happening. The teacher was explaining the distribution of average expenses of previous year. The best part was the he made a nice vegetarian pizza, the pizza base and cheese was called the entire population and wedges of different vegetables were  the other aspects like housing sector, food sector etc. 

After this we were discussing the policy implementation and the professor explained once we gave the idea having a pizza, the policy was proposed, and to implement the policy, we need to order online and this is what called policy implementation initiation.

However, before we could do it, we must understand the discrepancy in population, and also need to respect the non-vegetarians and need to choose a chicken pizza as well. So we decided on Chicken Dominator which has almost all the yummy toppings.

Finally we ordered 10 pizzas online from www.dominos.co.in  which turned out to be a very convenient way of ordering with various features like customize your order, Pizza tracker etc. Our pizzas actually reached within 30 mins and I ran to grab them as the Italian herby aroma announced their presence in our department. Now was the time to implement the policy and eat and enjoy the much awaited Italian pie. It was a huge party, full of enthusiasm and most importantly the humor that took off had the flavor of economics in a cheesy way.

This was really innovative and flavorful which made me an absolute fan of my teacher. This not only made the pizza gang bigger as other students who were not a part of our gang also joined in contributing and enjoying the pizza affair, but we also learned some of the boring topics in the most interesting way possible. This was one of the lessons I will remember all my life.

Until this day, I detested studies, specifically economics thinking it was just based on assumptions, but ever since the famous pizza session, I started scoring good and my learning trajectory kept on rising which made me a favorite student of my favorite teacher.

The pizzas actually bridged the gap between me and studies and finally today I owe a lot to that pizza session which not only gave me everlasting memories but also changed me to focus more and score well in studies.