Empowering home chefs

By Puja Gupta

New Delhi, Aug 31  Inderpreet started following his passion of cooking 20 years back by inventing new dishes and eventually catering food for small parties.

Five years ago, he decided to take a step further in his passion and started making pickles. He makes 100 percent homemade pickles that include no unnatural food source like preservatives or food colouring. He now makes more than 100 varieties of pickles and jams.

Inderpreet believes that marketing food through word of mouth can reach out to everyone. And hence he collaborated with Shef, a Mumbai-based platform that aggregates home chefs from across the city for people who want to indulge in homemade food/bakes.

“Through Shef platform, I like to connect with more people who are actually looking for authentic, homemade and hygienic food. I believe that food is a word of mouth and it should be reach out to everyone. This platform will help me to serve my food to customers through my own kitchen,” Inderjeet tells IANSlife.

RavRaj Singh has a culinary experience of over nine years in continental, Indian, Chinese and middle East cuisines and have worked across marquee hotels and restaurants- Taj Lands End, JW Marquis Dubai, The Lalit, Indigo Deli, Bayroute and others.

His passion for cooking pushed him to start his own venture, where he spun everyday food with some delicious fusion and serve an array of offerings by a professional chef in his own home kitchen.

Singh is also one of the over 200 chef at Shef that offers a wide variety of cuisines from authentic regional cuisine to gourmet, healthy diet meals to vegan, gluten free, diabetic friendly meals, Indian mithais to international dessert platters all under one roof.

Rishi Chhabria, co-founder of Shef says: “The idea behind starting Shef was to empower talented home chefs and bakes and cater to millions of people who trusted home cooked food to be more clean, happier and healthier food, however lack of convenience to order confined it to close neighourhood or just between friends and families.”

This platform has specialties in offering fresh cooked food made with fresh ingredients from chef’s private home kitchen. Customer would know who is cooking for them with the small brief of chefs available on the portal and app, food customization available, order from any ‘shef’ of your choice.

Also, people can order anything that can be made at home like fresh spice, pickle, jam, snacks and proper food. Individual can pre-order food for the entire week in the customized style from their favourite shefs.

Deepti Verma Chhabria, co-founder, Shef says: “With Shef, we want to assist in the empowerment of home chefs and bakers to reach out to a wider audience; easy accessibility and availability of home cooked food for customers and; address the issue of lack of convenience in ordering home cooked authentic food.

“Additionally, with our strong delivery network, we would ensure customers can order home cooked food via Shef from any part of the city, without any area limitations. This is possible because of pre-booking of meals on our app, giving convenience and a vast variety to choose from.”

Shef now aims to on-board around 1,000 chefs and expand their service to five more cities by the end of 2020 FY.