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Tag: Dabbawalas

  • Why restaurants are stepping away from Swiggy, Zomato with #OrderDirect campaign

    Why restaurants are stepping away from Swiggy, Zomato with #OrderDirect campaign

    MUMBAI: Food delivery continues to be the mainstay for the restaurant industry hit hard by the pandemic with lockdowns and restrictions in place. While this has come as a boon for the food aggregators and delivery apps, it has also taken away a significant portion of the restaurants’ earnings by way of commission to these platforms.

    With these food apps currently the only source of revenue for many restaurants across the country, restaurants fear the industry is emerging into a duopoly controlled by the food aggregators. With reopening of the hospitality sector looking uncertain in the near future, more eateries are looking to improve margins by trying out alternatives to aggregators Zomato and Swiggy.

    The National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI) recently announced the #OrderDirect campaign to offer a democratized digital channel with low commissions, data ownership, control over policies, and an unbundled technology stack. NRAI president Anurag Katriar referred to the food aggregator apps as ‘virtual landlords’ last year highlighting the urgent need for the sector to reduce its dependence on such platforms. To safeguard their interest, restaurants are now collectively coming up with their loyalty scheme, bill settlement technology, and even a home delivery solution.  

    Riyaaz Amlani- CEO & MD, Impresario Entertainment and Hospitality, who operates a chain of restaurants in several cities- is among the key voices backing #OrderDirect in India. From this week onwards, in a first-of-its-kind pilot project, his hospitality portfolio has teamed up with Mumbai’s Dabbawala for home deliveries. Riyaaz Amlani posted on LinkedIn, “Thrilled to announce a partnership that just fits. Dabbawalas know a thing or two about getting you your meals on time. They are severely impacted by the pandemic. Working with this awesome group of people is a privilege and a natural extension of our D2C push. #orderdirect “.

    Impresario Handmade Restaurants is employing several dabbawalas in Mumbai who will service direct delivery orders received on Impresario’s tech-enabled platforms for their restaurant brands such as SOCIAL, Smoke House Deli, and Salt Water Cafe. Orders from these restaurants in the Lower Parel, Bandra, and BKC areas of Mumbai will be fulfilled by the dabbawalas starting this week in a seemingly win-win solution for both parties. The association will roll out in phases over the next few months, each employing more dabbawalas and strengthening the partnership.

    This association also takes away from delivery aggregators such as Swiggy and Zomato. According to Amlani, ordering directly from restaurants (and not through aggregators) empowers the company to have direct and deeper relationships with its customers and saves on prohibitive commissions paid to the aggregators. “We are then able to pass on these savings to our customers and allow them to benefit from ordering directly. Now, ordering directly is also helping to employ our dabbawalas, who have lost their livelihoods due to the pandemic. We need to support each other through these trying times, and this is Impresario’s way of meaningfully extending a helping hand. We are hopeful that this association will trigger the rest of the hospitality industry to employ them too,” he told a publication.

    While recognising the positive aspects of what the aggregators are offering the restaurants and customers, Food Matters’ founder and CEO India Gauri Devidayal, says “This relationship is no longer a partnership but rather is one built on dependency… This is not just about saving on commissions but also servicing an increased radius of delivery and therefore having the potential for higher revenues.”

    For restaurateurs looking to start their online ordering platform and reduce dependency on food aggregators DotPe, Thrive Now and Peppo are some of the tech partners supporting NRAI in this campaign. They are helping to build full-stack solutions and a sustainable hospitality ecosystem together with the restaurants.

    Whether these innovations are feasible and able to democratize the food industry, only time will tell.

  • Corning uses Micromax Vdeo to narrate tough dabbawalas’ story

    MUMBAI: Corning Gorilla Glass has unveiled a global marketing communications campaign, Incredibly Tough, highlighting incredibly tough people, doing incredibly tough things using devices that are equally tough. The campaign will be promoted across social media channels, on regional online TV platforms and through multiple language influencers including Marathi.

    The Incredibly Tough campaign highlights stories of extraordinary people using devices that feature Corning Gorilla Glass in some of the toughest ways imaginable, including a parkour athlete training and taking on tough city streets; an adventurer trekking one of China toughest roads and, in India, the incredibly tough Dabbawalas of Mumbai.

    Corning Gorilla Glass has been used on nearly five billion devices worldwide, including more than 1,800 product models across 40 major brands.

    In India, the campaign kicked off with an online story based on Mumbai’s Dabbawalas. Done in collaboration with Micromax’s new Vdeo series for the value segment, the Incredibly Tough Dabbawala story begins with the Dabbawala’s morning early on a working day, sees him travel across Mumbai, collect, deliver and re-collect the lunch boxes before heading home on Mumbai’s local trains where he uses his phone to send messages to his family and watch a video clip. The featured Dabbawala comments on the importance of his device and how technology has changed how they work every day.

    This real-life story accentuates Corning research in India that highlighted the importance of a mobile phone to consumers. In a recent poll, nearly 58% of consumers polled in India said that their smartphone is the most expensive thing that they carry with them daily, and their single biggest worry is damaging their device.

    The campaign includes promotion of the video, development of a microsite dedicated to the Dabbawalas and other marketing assets to highlight the lives of a Mumbai institution. Uniquely for the Dabbawalas, the promotion will be featured in India, the United States and China.

  • Discovery launches digital campaign for ‘Mumbai Railway’ series

    Discovery launches digital campaign for ‘Mumbai Railway’ series

    MUMBAI: Discovery Channel has launched an innovative digital campaign to build its new series Mumbai Railway, reflecting the significance, delight and bond of the 7.5 million people commuting daily on an embodiment of Mumbai – the Mumbai Local.

     

    The campaign has been executed by Twentythree, a boutique digital marketing agency.

     

    Discovery Channel associated with Humans of Bombay to highlight the stories of Mumbai citizens and created a viral video campaign to bring to the fore multiple stories of compassion, harmony and jubilation. 

     

    The campaign struck an immediate chord with the audience generating 65,000 video views and nearly one million reach.

     

    The campaign #MumbaiRailways highlights the significance of the Mumbai local in a Mumbaikar’s life. Starting with a story of a senior citizen travelling in the local since 35 years to Dabbawalas sharing their experience as to how the local trains have eased the job, to a college-going girl who finds the trains to be the safest mode of transport; five compelling 30 second videos were produced.

     

    The campaign was topped with a heart-warming 150 second video where people commented their first thoughts about Mumbai Local.

     

    Discovery Networks Asia Pacific EVP and GM – South Asia Rahul Johri said, “Discovery Channel is missioned to inspire audience with path-breaking content. We leveraged the digital platform to dialogue and drive real life stories of Mumbaikars and their unmatched bond with the iconic Mumbai local.”

     

    It can be recalled that Discovery Channel recently premiered the series Mumbai Railway that explores the ‘everyday miracle’ of the UNESCO World Heritage Site, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST); and highlights that significance of the Mumbai Local.

  • Tempo collaborates with Mumbai’s ‘Dabbawalas’

    Tempo collaborates with Mumbai’s ‘Dabbawalas’

    MUMBAI: Sweden-based SCA’s hygiene brand, Tempo has initiated an on ground activity in Mumbai. This campaign is basically rolled out to spread awareness on cleaning hands and using a sanitizer.

     

    The brand has collaborated with Mumbai’s Dabbawalas at the hands of celebrity Karishma Kapoor to spread the message of hand hygiene to 1,00,000 smart foodies to follow a healthy way of eating by using a sanitizer before eating and a tissue after eating food.

     

    Commenting on the campaign imitation, SCA MD Cecilia Edebo said, “Promoting good hygiene in sync with the local Indian eating habits, SCA aimed at bringing a smart way to enjoy food anytime and anywhere to the Kerala market. psLIVE has been an integral part in helping us achieve the same. We look forward to engaging them in our endeavor to spread our products and message on pan-India basis.”

     

     “We are excited with the success of this campaign. With an insightful team and extensive research we are eager to continue ideating and executing campaigns that will help the brand enhance their presence in the Indian market,” added psLIVE vice president Sidharth Ghosh.

     

    As part of the campaign, Mumbai’s famous Dabbawalas, gathered together at various locations and placed a pack of Tempo Pocket hanky tissues and a 15ml bottle of hand sanitizers in Smart Foodie bag to 20,000 dabbas on the first day of promoting the real joy of eating with hands instead of fork and spoon. It can be observed that the brand also collaborated with fast food chain McDonalds extensively when it was just launched in the market. 

  • Siemens India launches innovative integrated digital campaign

    Siemens India launches innovative integrated digital campaign

    MUMBAI: Siemens India has launched an innovative digital media campaign that uses a creative story telling technique to deliver the message to end customers. The latest digital media campaign is an extension of the Answers campaign followed globally by Siemens, which is aimed at establishing Siemens as a sustainable technology leader delivering a transformational benefit toward customers.

    Thought Process was the production house while Ogilvy was involved in the conceptualisation. The digital agency managing the campaign is Quasar (part of the WPP group), while the digital assets were created by Conrad-Caine, Munich. The social media agency involved in the campaign is LBI (part of Publicis).

    The campaign will run for a durationof six months.

    “We have made the end-user the protagonist as well as the narrator of the story. We have kicked off the story series with the dabbawalas who use the Mumbai local trains to deliver lunch to over 200,000 office-goers and residences on time. We have brought the element of story-telling right into our creative approach,” says Siemens India head of digital media Sudhir M D.

    In the integrated digital marketing campaign, where social media is complemented by a QR code initiative, on-ground and off-line promotions, a dabbawala named Kiran Gavande narrates his story, establishing how he goes about his life. The online banners direct the website visitors to the video on YouTube brand channel of      Siemens, which then directs the visitor to the Siemens web site with details on the actual Siemens technology that has contributed to the dabbawala’s life.

    The ‘Answers’ program is designed to demonstrate the lasting impact of Siemens technologies to improve lives, improve cities and improve businesses for the better. This is achieved through a creative strategy designed to simply reveal the truth about Siemens, and reveal the brand’s greatness. In an age of increasing transparency, enabled by digital and social media, telling the truth is the strongest statement a brand can make, especially since target audiences can now very quickly discover what is a truth.

    Siemens stories generally start with a human issue, which then leads to a global problem. In every case a Siemens Answer resolves the issue, and ultimately changes peoples’ lives significantly for the better, or avoids a problem that would have changed their lives significantly for the worse.

  • Lunch Box: A beautiful food for thought

    Lunch Box: A beautiful food for thought

    The famous ‘Dabbawalas’ of Mumbai were accorded Six Sigma performance rating by the prestigious American business publication Forbes Global. That means that only one in a 16 million deliveries goes wrong. There have been films made on romance due to a wrong number called, following blank calls, on chats and emails. Lunch Box derives its story from that one-in-16-million mistake that a ‘Dabbawala’ makes: a mistaken delivery of a tiffin.

    Producer: Guneet Monga, Anurag Kashyap, Arun Rungachari.
    Director: Ritesh Batra.
    Cast: Irrfan Khan, Nimrat Kaur, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Bharati Achrekar.

     

    Irrfan Khan is a widowed Catholic man living in a Mumbai suburb. He leads the morose life of a government servant commuting on the crowded local trains to the office and back home with cigarettes being his only companions. He has been working for 35 years with a perfect record and has decided to take premature retirement and settle down in the city of Nasik. He is serving his notice period and has been asked to train a new recruit, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, before he leaves. That is when a ‘dabbawala’ delivers to him a ‘dabba’ which does not only look richer than his in packaging but also contains tasty, aromatic homemade food which is a feast, compared to the insipid food provided by his caterer every day. Irrfan makes it a point to meet his caterer on the way home to thank him and tell him to keep up this quality of cooking.

    Nimrat Kaur is a housewife and a mother of small girl. She loves to add to her expertise in cooking with a little help from an aunty a floor above her, Bharati Achrekar, who loves to share her ideas. It has been a few years since her marriage and she tries to live up the adage, ‘the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach’. She cooks a new menu everyday expecting praise from her husband every evening. This time, her tiffin has reached Irrfan. He sends a chit saying that the food was very good but there was too much salt, to which she replies the next day by putting too much chilli.

     

    The exchange of notes becomes a regular feature. Irrfan’s life becomes a little more exciting as he looks forward to lunch everyday, as much for a note from her as for the food. As for Nimrat, she has just realised her husband is having an affair and is hardly ever at home and this distraction helps buffer the shock. Irrfan, who is a loner who never interacts with anybody either in office or where he lives, has come to life. He even starts entertaining Nawazuddin, tries to teach him the work and, eventually, also lets him join for and share his lunch. In fact, Nawazuddin, who is an orphan, becomes his only confidante while he becomes his guardian at his Nikah.

     

    Irrfan and Nimrat’s notes grow from one-liners to full pages and soon two pages. Soon they think there has been enough of ‘letterbaazi’ and decide to meet instead.

     

    Lunch Box is built on small budget and thin theme but it is the sidetracks that fill it out. Not only does it depict a middleclass Mumbai lifestyle and its lifeline, the local trains, but also the disorganised government offices and their lifeless, robotic staff. But most of all it brings to life on screen the much celebrated 5,000-strong ‘dabbawalas’ workforce which one notices only when foreign guests like Prince Charles or Richard Branson visit them or when foreign TV channels cover them. The journey of the ‘dabba’ from collection in the morning until return in the evening becomes a part of the story. Until the justified culmination is to be reached, the film is a light watch with a subtle but unmissable humour, which is all the more effective because of Irrfan’s pokerfaced mouthing of the lines. Nawazuddin is a perfect foil to Irrfan and he is even developing a bit of suave personality with success. Nimrat is natural. The ‘dabbawalas’, the celebrities that they have become are never conscious of the camera. Bharati Achrekar only lands her voice as aunty without showing her persona but is effective.

     

    Phata Poster Nikhla Hero: A comedy of errors

     
    Producers: Ramesh Taurani.
    Director: Rajkumar Santoshi.
    Cast: Shahid Kapoor, Ileana DCruz, Padmini Kolhapure, Saurabh Shukla, Darshan Jariwala, Zakir Hussain, Sanjay Mishra, Rana Jung Bahadur, Salman Khan (Cemeo), Nargis Fakhri (Item number).

     

    New filmmakers with no big stars or budgets at their disposal are coming up with novel themes and many are succeeding. Yet makers with established names and bigger budgets don’t take such risks: their insecurity and lack of creative confidence doesn’t allow them to try something off the beaten path. Hence Rajkumar Santoshi decides to look to the past to find a ‘fresh’ entertainer. Unfortunately, he picks a mundane B-grade story and tries to give it a Manmohan Desai approach by adding a mother’s emotions, a runaway father and a villain’s den full of fools and so on to come up with a not so entertaining farce.

     

    Shahid Kapur is being brought up to be an honest policeman by his mother, Padmini Kolhapure. But Shahid has different plans for himself: he aspires to be a film hero and, like the Khans, wants to establish his own brand, the Vishwas Rao label which is his screen name. Every time Padmini sends him for police academy tests, he makes sure he fails. This time, he goes for a test to Mumbai and ends up at a strugglers’ hotel (many of which existed in Mumbai suburbs in 1960s and ’70s) where many others like him are lodged. The veteran is Sanjay Mishra, who did not amount to anything himself. He takes Shahid to film director, Tinu Anand, who is looking to cast a negative character. Shahid impresses him by putting on an act, the kind seen in just about all films of wannabe actors. He is cast immediately and is required to wear a police inspector’s dress.

     

    Every time Shahid is in police dress, Ileana D’Cruz happens to need police help and manages to bump into him. She is a journalist and a self-styled social worker who runs to the police station with so many complaints that the cops have named her Complaint Kajal. By the second such escapade, romance blossoms. Somehow, word reaches Padmini that her son has become a policeman and she decides to visit him in Mumbai to see her son in uniform. Now the only way for Shahid is to keep wearing the uniform till Padmini is with him.

     

    The villain, Saurabh Shukla, operates from a night club which gives Shahid scope to show his already famous dancing prowess. Somehow or the other, Shahid is present in uniform wherever there is trouble taking place and saves the situation. Neither the ACP, Darshan Jariwala, nor the corrupt cop, Zakir Hussain, in cahoots with Saurabh, has any clue who this inspector is, who is solving crimes singlehandedly!

     

    It is time for mother’s sentiment to come in play; Padmini comes to know her son is not a real policeman and just a bit actor. Obviously, she is devastated as she had a reason behind her ambition of making him into a cop, an honest one at that. She faints and is taken to hospital from where she lands straight into villain’s hands. Not yet, but finally the film ends.

     

    The film does not follow a taut script but rather pieces together gags and incidents and hence lacks flow. The director gives the film a bit of Manmohan Desai and a bit of Kundan Shah (Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro), both with ordinary results. The film has some good tunes and Shahid adds to the USP of those dancing kinds. Photography is fair. Editing is not up to mark. Action is well composed. The film is a Shahid vehicle all the way. Ilena is pretty and does a good job. Jariwala along with Saurabh, Mishra and Hussain raise laughs. Padmini makes an apt mother to Shahid.

     

    Phata Poster Nikhla Hero has not been received well and lacks on entertainment too.