Click for Cheese

While this started off as an experiment to tap the possibility of a larger market for high-end products,such as blue cheese from Denmark and bacon slabs from Spain,Mehta soon realised that he was on to something. “We got 30,000 hits on the website in the first week we began. Now,we get an average of 20 orders every day from across Mumbai,” he says.

The last one year has witnessed a sharp rise in online shopping for clothes and electronics in India. However,the use of websites to sell gourmet food has been limited. Nevertheless,entrepreneurs like Mehta have begun to realise that keeping their wares exclusive to the virtual medium has several advantages. “Our target audience is distributed all over Mumbai,so being online means we’re not restricting ourselves to a particular area,” points out Mehta.

There are others,too. Gourmet Company that specialises in gourmet gifts,kitchen essentials,exotic teas and coffees,now delivers all over India. Red Ninja Express,a tiny take-out Chinese kitchen in Bandra,has gained immense popularity after it started to advertise food combinations on Twitter while also accepting orders from their ‘Followers’. For the health conscious,the Calorie Care portal offers a range of Indian and continental meals that are calorie-counted to customers’ specific needs.

Shilarna Vaze,a chef trained in Paris’ reputed Cordon Bleu and a television host for the channel Food Food,is overwhelmed by the response she’s received to a Facebook page she created for Ninja Sushi,a brand that delivers healthy Maki rolls throughout the suburbs. She gets around six orders a day,caters to private parties and has regular business coming in from Body Image,celebrity fitness trainer Yasmin Karachiwala’s gym. Having run a restaurant in Goa for the last one year,now operating from her home and working on simpler terms is a refreshing prospect for the 28-year-old chef. “With the kind of overheads involved in running your own place — rent,staff and cooks,to name a few — I realised that I would have to sell at least 100 maki rolls every day (averaging Rs 300 each) to make any kind of money,” she says. “Places in Mumbai just open and close within a year. But if you keep an eye on quality and consistency,you can operate out of anywhere.”

But while many are happy limiting their service to the virtual space,Rupali Ambekar of Tea Culture of The World,a brand that sells international teas online,dreams of opening a tea parlour. “Tea is an experience of the senses. While people enjoy reading about tea on our website,demonstrating how it should be brewed is a different experience altogether,” she explains. The ex-medical practitioner is limited by factors such as finding the right location and support staff and the steep rent that she will have to cough up for the space. However,Ambekar isn’t giving up on her dream just yet because she is also tiring of the challenges that India’s online shopping culture throws up. “People still have reservations about ordering online,” she says. “Most of our customers read about products on the website but prefer calling us to place orders. They also don’t want to use their cards,preferring instead to pay on delivery or making direct bank transfers.”