Stories Behind our Homecooks — Finding Creativity through Cooking for Others
Last March marked my first home cook visit as part of the Yeah! Meshi onboarding process. This event would be my first step to understanding Yeah! Meshi’s main mission: to create supplemental income for passionate home cooks through cooking. Through Yeah! Meshi’s team of homecooks, the platform aims to help provide food for thousands of busy families daily. For my first visit, I went to South Jakarta to see Shinta, one of our passionate homecooks with 2 beautiful kids.
When I arrived at the house, I was welcomed by Shinta, her two kids, and her mom, while her husband was at work. I felt the warmth of a small and happy family home. I talked a lot with Shinta and her mother as they busily prepared their orders from Yeah! Meshi and Corporate Catering, since we all share a love of food. Interestingly, Shinta’s mother started her own small culinary business in Jakarta in the 2000s, providing lunches for several companies around their location. Shinta loves cooking Javanese food because she wants to preserve her strong family traditions and it reminds her of her hometown, Temanggung, Central Java. Also, I got a chance to play with Shinta’s children, they were so active and playful at home!
Yeah! Meshi as an outlet for Creativity
Shinta started to cook as a ‘sous chef’ for her mother’s small business. With basic techniques and recipes learned from her mother, she started to create and reinvent some of her mother’s recipes, finding her signature style of cooking. At first, Shinta felt insecure about her recipes and was afraid that her dishes wouldn’t be acceptable for her future customers. Then, she started to build a small scale business by providing some of her neighbors with her dishes. Since some of her neighbors are families with picky eater kids, she started to learn and collaborate with her mother to provide suitable dishes (Non-MSG, kids friendly menus with some variations like soups, beef patty) for these families. With great reviews and repeat orders coming from her customers, she felt a bit confident and ready to expand her business. After joining Yeah! Meshi, Shinta acquired a wide variety of customers with different preferences and tastes. With that kind of situation and frequent feedback from her customers, she gained confidence and got motivated to improve her cooking. She made some adjustments on her menu based on customers’ feedback in quantity and type of dishes to satisfy them without losing her own identity. Also, she created new variations of dishes for her customers, along with improving her food quality, to provide busy families with her delicious, healthy dishes. Yeah! Meshi has provided Shinta with the perfect opportunity to boost her confidence and creativity and to improve her skills. Shinta now offers 7 menus to Yeah! Meshi customers. Two of these were launched 2 weeks ago; Empal Gentong and Bandeng Presto. Empal Gentong is a traditional dish from Cirebon, a small city located 300 km away from Jakarta, famous for its signature soupy broth mixed with tender beef. Bandeng Presto is a pressure-cooked Milkfish with signature spices to enrich the flavor. This dish is very popular in Central Java and recommended for meal prep because Bandeng Presto can be kept in the fridge for up to 3 days and in the freezer for 2 weeks! In this Ramadan occasion, she customized her signature Bandeng Presto into beautiful Ramadan Hampers for her customers’ gifts.
Yeah! Meshi in the Future
It’s been a year since we started Yeah! Meshi with our mission to improve homecook’s supplemental income from their true passion. In our current dynamic external environment, we have 26 homecooks on board and they are continuing to grow. With this growth, and the inspirational stories behind each of our homecooks on their Yeah! Meshi journey, I hope Yeah! Meshi will become a bigger outlet for home cooks in Indonesia to grow, boost their confidence and creativity, and make their cooking journey a priceless lifetime experience!
