Creating a platform where homecooks empowered by solving busy mom’s problem in Indonesia 🇮🇩
The reality for working Moms in Jakarta
Nina is a busy working mother with two kids. Living in a satellite town just outside Jakarta means she must spend around three hours commuting to her office in central Jakarta each day. This is everyone’s headache — the traffic in Jakarta is indiscriminate. Leaving home at 7:00 am and returning from work after 7:00 pm she is exhausted from the travelling and a long day at work, and although entirely understandable she feels strong guilt that she has no energy left for cooking for her family. Instead, she’ll turn to one of many convenient alternatives available to her — fast-food delivery, street food or catering — and spend what little free time she has left relaxing with her family.
This is the reality for thousands of working moms in Jakarta, and many have it much worse with commutes upwards of two-hours each way. The overloaded transport infrastructure, coupled with easy access to fast-food, lacking nutrients or fresh ingredients makes it an uphill-battle to put good, traditional homecooked food on the table for families. The alternatives are just too convenient.
Luckily, Nina has found a solution. Once a week, she has a meal-prep package delivered by a local, accomplished homecook called Sonya, through the “Yeah! Meshi” platform. Sonya is a great help for busy moms like Nina. Sonya supplies the main dish, and Nina prepares some rice, heats the meal prep, serves, and the dinner is ready. Compared to catering and on-demand food deliveries , this is as convenient, but much healthier for her growing children. Her guilt is somewhat alleviated.
A day of a home cook.
Similar to Nina, Sonya is also a mother. As is common in Jakarta, she gave up her career when she got married so she could concentrate on caring for her children and family. Cooking for mothers like Nina through “Yeah! Meshi” offers her a way to get back into work, and begin earning money again.
Each Tuesday she’ll wake early to prepare the meals her customers have ordered. The day before, Sonya will have checked the “Yeah! Meshi” app to see how many orders she has received and what ingredients she will need to purchase, heading to the market in the afternoon to collect them fresh from her trusted sources.
Working diligently, by around midday she has successfully cooked all the order and handed them to delivery bikes.
When she first joined “Yeah! Meshi” it was not easy for her to cook many different orders at the same time; however, she is happy to realise she is now better at time management and feels of sense of achievement and development in her cooking.
Customer’s positive feedback provides her with a great reward, which she loves. However, she has one more substantial reward. She cooks the same menu for her family, and her kids love Tuesday’s dinner especially.
“Mom, I love your food. I tell my friends every Tuesday is like a buffet and I feel like in a party.” Sonya smiles.
And the money helps, too. She recently upgraded her phone from old Android to a new iPhone with the money she earns.
A platform providing income for thousands of passionate home cooks
“Yeah! Meshi” is aiming to create supplemental income for more than ten-thousand passionate homecooks, by supporting them in what they already love doing — cooking. Through this, we want to solve the food-issues of thousands of Moms across Jakarta. For us, enabling Moms to help and support other Moms through food is a beautiful partnership that we can help to foster.
Our operational model is designed with homecooks commitments and capabilities in mind — homecooks cook meals once a week, and their customers are limited to ensure they can keep up with demand. This helps busy mothers too — they don’t need to order food every day, saving time and mental exertion.
We believe that the number of home cooks will increase if we can successfully create a platform in which daily cooking generates supplemental income. This is Cookpad mission.
Enablers such as the internet, frictionless payment or on-demand delivery services are all available, and now the challenge is to design a solution well enough to make this behaviour change. There are several home-cooked meal delivery services in the world already, many of which we have carefully analysed. Our continuous dedication to experimenting and learning from failure has resulted in a good formula and solution for operations that make unit-economic sense, keeping higher margins for cooks than working at average restaurants.
Our biggest community.
Indonesia has been rising and so does the Cookpad community there.
The economy of Indonesia has been growing steadily, and the country is committed to developing for another 20 years. Indonesia is one of the seven countries where GDP per capita has grown at least 3.5% for 50 years*. The country strives to be a high-income country from mid-income before 2038 by enjoying its demographic bonus**.
No other regions’ Cookpad community is as large as the one in Indonesia. Not just sharing recipes online, but users meet up by themselves and organize several unique Cooking events just for fun.
Food and cooking is a way of life and source of joy and happiness for the majority in our community, and through “Yeah! Meshi” we hope to share this happiness wider to those that have found their love of food put under pressure by the demands of fast, modern family life.
We hope some of “Yeah! Meshi”’s busy mom customers will want to be home cooks someday.
* A report from MGI
** according to government official’s speech. A PwC report mentions the stats.
We are not just making a product…
We are, however, building a team and the capability of exploring new ideas and releasing them to the market continuously and rapidly. For the “Yeah! Meshi” project as an example, the tech and business teams are based in Bristol and Tokyo with the local operation team on the ground in Jakarta — we are working around the clock and globe. We regularly undertake SPRINTs in Jakarta to solve more significant problems as an entire team effort, and use three-day SPRINTs to scan models in different regions quickly.
As a product company, it is vital that we don’t make the mistake of developing products from a tech viewpoint, instead of from peoples’ life viewpoints. We visit their homes and kitchens, then observe or interact with home cooks to learn. Human-centric is easier said than done.
For techy readers, with regards to app development, we have been recently using Flutter for some projects, including “Yeah! Meshi”. It’s working well and pretty easy to ship to both iOS and Android from one codebase. This is great for us to move and test quickly with whatever device our users have and to keep the team small but mighty.
You can find more story on Yeah! Meshi Journey medium.
There are many ways you can contribute to this. Are you interested in this venture? Drop me a line.
