KhanaGaDi – Leveraging Food Designing and Technology to Provide Awesome Meal Options in Trains

With more than 22 million passengers travelling in Indian trains daily, Indian Railways is the world’s second largest railroad network, covering the length and breadth of this vast country from the Himalayas to down south and from the east coast to the west coast. Train travel is almost synonymous with adventure and fun.

Getting quality food in trains has been a huge problem for every passenger since many years, as most of the trains either do not have pantry cars or food available in them or the platforms of stations do not qualify on the merits of hygiene, quality and taste. Being the victim of poor food services in a train on a winter night in November 2014 while on a trip to Varanasi, Amit Deep Kumar decided to start ‘KhanaGaDi’, a Jaipur-based mobile app Train Food Delivery aggregator which currently serves approximately 25K menu items across 250 major stations in India with a network of 500+ vendor partners. Amit founded KhanaGaDi in January 2015 and was later on joined by Sunil Kumar Awasthi and Rakesh Gupta as COO and CTO respectively.

“KhanaGaDi was founded on the core philosophy of aligning food designing and technology. We were looking to explore the ideas on covering such a vast rail network and hundreds of stations where we need to provide food to passengers. We were clear right from the start that only through robust use of advance technology and food designing, will we be able to achieve our objective,” added Amit, Founder and CEO of KhanaGaDi.com.

KhanaGaDi’s core strength is its food assortment available in pre-portioned quantity and convenient packaging. It serves a range of items across various cuisines like North Indian, South Indian, Gujarati, Marwari, Bengali, Punjabi, Mughlai, etc. covering the breakfast, lunch, snacks and dinner categories. It also serves niche menu items like diabetic and cardiac-friendly and Jain meals at selected stations through its powerful network of vendors who are micro entrepreneurs, ladies working from home, small caterers and restaurants across India.

“Network connectivity at train tracks was a challenge and we knew that we needed to overcome it with smart technology in place so we have worked around intelligent algorithms to track train arrival time at stations and create the order process cycle accordingly. Now we inform both vendors and customers about train status and reschedule the orders in case of delays. Our back-end system works on AI defined rules and the entire ops is monitored from our Command Center in Jaipur. Recently we have launched a vendor side Android app so that they can manage their orders automatically and sync with our back-end operations system,” added Amit