Coming together of Khaanachahiye.com

Ruben Mascarenhas first thought he has to do something about the people who would go hungry due to the lockdown. He first did a pilot along with Pathik Muni, which was sponsored by Niti Goel, the owner of Madras Diaries and 3 other restaurants. They ran their first pilot with 1200 meals along the western express highway in the city. While the pilot was challenging, everyone on the team felt that the need was immense and they couldn’t let challenges stop them.

Pathik Muni says, “I never understood hunger. My father used to say hunger can never be understood by anyone who has never craved for food”. I did not understand his wise words until I stepped out on the streets of Mumbai when the lockdown was first imposed and saw hungry children. I couldn’t bear to imagine what I would do if my child would have been hungry like that. It just shattered me. My father used to say, if we want to do something, there can be no excuses. I just took courage from my father’s life of hard work and inspiration from his words and decided we had to do something to ensure thes people are fed. ” 

Setting up processes

A protocol was established wherein demand was checked for genuineness, followed by ascertaining route and identification of kitchen to serve them. Further, this distribution of the food is equally crucial since the volunteers distributing food needed to be in protective gear, properly sanitising themselves and the food needed to be fit for eating. The volunteers called Food Ninja or warriors as they term, had to be on boarded told about the safety protocols and protective gear had to be procured for them when it was extremely difficult to come by. While this itself seemed like a herculean task. The kitchens themselves had to make a process. 

Pranav Rungta devised an SOP for the kitchens to follow. The SOP had instructions regarding the correct method of sanitising for all the kitchen staff, sanitisation process of grains and packing process. Packing is as crucial as anything since the food needs to be fresh and fit for the end-user. Typically, the kitchens start cooking by 4 am to ensure that food is ready for packing by 8 am. While Mazher and Pranav handled distribution, route mapping etc.,

Neeti along with her 4 friends from the restaurant industry quickly got together to put together a supply chain. When the lockdown happened, there was no access to any supplies of fresh produce or grains. There were two challenges that Neeti had to fix, 

1. Challenge was to set up a supply chain for grains and produce,
2. The second challenge was to procure the produce and grains at a very good rate in order to reduce the cost of the meals being cooked.

Initially, Neeti contacted her suppliers in the APMC market, arranged passes from BMC and procured produce and grains from them. However, this was not a viable option plus she needed to bring the cost of meals down thus she decided to directly procure from the farmers themselves. Every rupee saved meant more could be feed. As Neeti and her friends belonged to the restaurant background, she quickly used her professional experience to reach out to farmers, negotiated deals. Her staff struggled for 3 days to get passes from BMC in order for the farmers to transport produce and grains. Once the initial hurdles were crossed, things started to fall into place. Rice & vegetables were procured from farmers in Nasik and dal from mills in Sangli. The supply typically comes in once a week. Indirectly they also helped the farmers who couldn’t sell their produce at the mandis due to the lockdown.

The team at Khaana Chahiye decided that they would be giving one meal a day to as many people as possible. Once someone is identified on a route their commitment is to give them food till the end of lockdown. I have been talking to team members from Khana Chahiye from the last 4 days and just hearing them talk about them is overwhelming since the amount of work they do is tremendous. What makes these youngsters work so hard is the smile that food brings on the faces of the poor and hungry.  The interesting thing about this movement is that some of these team members have not even met each other but have been working with each other for the last 48 days for over 18 hours a day. To know how Khaana Chahiye managed this incredible feet of serving 2 million meals stay tuned for the upcoming stories on Khaana Chahiye on the Efforts For Good platform. If you would like to contribute to Khaanachahiye.com you can do it here.