Viva Chefs: Meals cooked in your home
Since Vaibhav Mistry and Ravi Yatnalkar moved from India to the San Francisco Bay Area 15 odd years ago, there was one problem they struggled to solve — accessing healthy and delicious home-cooked meals. With demanding work schedules in tech, they had little time to whip up meals at home. “When my mom would visit, she would make a lot of food in bulk,” says Mistry. On one such trip, knowing there was a limit to how much her son’s freezer could hold, Mistry’s mother suggested he find a cook to help with their favorite Indian comfort food.
Mistry reached out to his long-time friend, Ravi Yatnalkar, who had been relying on desi cooks in the Bay Area to prepare meals for his growing family. And that was the genesis of their startup, Viva Chefs, two friends exchanging notes on finding a cook who could prepare Indian comfort food at their homes.
“What if there was a network of cooks or chefs that you could tap into when you needed help?” the friends and future co-founders mused at that time, says Mistry.
Almost a year later, the startup has an app on Android and Apple devices and a website featuring a network of chefs with a range of cooking experiences – from line cooks in restaurants to private chefs to passionate home cooks. The location filter allows users to see who’s cooking in their neighborhood. Thousands of meals have been cooked for families across the Bay Area via Viva Chefs.
San Francisco-based entrepreneur Anuraag Nallapati and his wife are passionate about food. They let go of a former home cook in favor of one of the more professionally experienced cooks from the Viva Chefs platform. “We had some Peruvian hot sauce and exotic cheese, and the chef whipped up something amazing for us,” said Nallapati between bites of his meal. With all-day meetings, Nallapati says he could barely sit down for a meal, and in the absence of in-home cooking support, his only option was to order in, until now.
More than just comfort
When they started Viva Chefs, both Mistry and Yatnalkar were motivated to break out of their comfort zones as employees of Big Tech. But they also had their personal reasons for the move.
Several members of Yatnalkar’s immediate and extended family are involved in the food business. “I wanted to do something new and I knew food was something I really had the instinct for,” he says.
Mistry has more reasons to add to the list. He missed the nourishment of home-cooked meals and the heartwarming aspect of a sit-down family meal. It is a simple daily ritual that many experience growing up in India, and as research suggests, it has several benefits, including better interpersonal relationships, better nutrition indicators and improved mental health. Mistry says his mental and physical health suffered when he failed to make time for meals at home. Through Viva Chefs, Mistry hopes families will find that balance at least a few days a week. “That’s my grand vision,” he says.
A rooted tradition
The founders say community is one of the many differentiating factors of their startup, and this idea is rooted in their Indian heritage.
“In the US, private chefs are usually hired for special occasions, such as a party or for a large gathering, because cooking is special,” says Yatnalkar, a mechanical engineer by training and a former product engineer at Amazon. “In India, cooks become part of the family, they are welcome in the house, they know where everything is.”
While some clients like Nallapati prefer experienced professional chefs, other users crave traditional favorites and rave about the home cooks-turned-chefs on the platform. “So glad we have Chef Geetha. Our lives are so much easier leaving on time for work and we’ve really reduced ordering food from restaurants,” reads a user review. Chef Geeta writes in her bio: “My journey is inspired by the love for my family’s traditional recipes and the desire to share the authentic flavors of Hyderabad with the world.”
I, too, have been a prolific user of the platform. By my rough estimate, I save about six hours of my time with every booking of three dishes, which covers at least three meals for our family of four. The platform also reduces friction between cooks and families by prefixing certain preferences for every booking. Users can choose a select number of dishes to be prepared, while the platform gives chefs guidelines for recommended portion sizes. Clean-up is included and bookings are offered in three-hour slots. “This avoids needless hassles and negotiation,” says Yatnalkar.
Beyond supporting the technology and platform, Mistry says the founders “want to get out of the way”. This, they say, is also different from how other private chef startups work. For instance, a competing platform only hires chefs from culinary schools. Other similar platforms offer upselling of grocery shopping by private chefs.
“We don’t gatekeep,” says Mistry. This also keeps costs low, when all families need is large-ish portions of food, minus the time in the kitchen to get through busy weeks.
From work visas to first-time founders
Mistry and Yatnalkar are first-time startup founders; their journey from being tech workers to founders of a food startup is one not entirely unfamiliar to Indian citizens traversing the immigration process. The founders say they had to plow through a complicated legal process to get the startup going. One of the founders used his employment authorization document (EAD) to start the company, while the other is on the non-immigrant H1B work visa through the startup.
“If I am an engineer and have an idea for something completely different, such as cooking or construction, it’s almost impossible to do it, no matter how brilliant the idea is, no matter how brilliant your execution plan is, you won’t be able to do it, because you are here on an H1B visa given for specialty occupations and restricted to your degree,” said Mistry, a former electrical engineer at Amazon and Fitbit.
Moving from corporate jobs in large tech firms to building a startup has been a steep learning curve for both founders. Fundraising for a food startup in Silicon Valley, they learned, can throw up some confusing yet amusing moments.
“I spent most of one meeting with a VC explaining why our chefs were not former Michelin star employees. He was fixated on the word ‘chef’ rather than our business model,” says Mistry. Another venture capitalist presumed, through most of a three-hour-long meeting, that the founders were pitching an AI chef, a social-media-based virtual cooking platform with AI elements. Yet another investor in India, the founders said, presumed they were mere weeks away from listing on the Nasdaq!
Currently serving the California Bay Area, Viva Chefs is looking to expand to the rest of the U.S, soon-ish.
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