Imagine being miles away from home and missing your mom’s home-cooked food and someone brought your mom’s cooked food to you! The Gurgaon-based food-tech platform, JustMyRoots, a pioneer in interstate perishable food delivery, is working on the same idea. Promita Sengupta, director, and co-founder, JustMyRoots.com, during her travels, observed that when people move from their city to a new place, it gets difficult for them to accept the new culture. Promita too missed her mom’s cooked food and decided to start this business for all those people who miss their home and home-cooked food.
With this vision in mind, JustMyRoots promises to deliver the essence of your culture and love from home, all packed in delicious food. Founded in 2016, the company has a PAN India presence across 19 cities including Delhi NCR, Kolkata, Jaipur, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, and Kashmir.
Business model
Sharing about the company’s business model, Samir Sengupta, co-founder of JustMyRoots, says, “Our Business model works on four pillars – Local sales of products, intercity state or city sale of products, Direct from home (DFH) and Airport (Delhi T3 Departure foodcourt). We work in a B2C model where customers access our app or website and identify the product that they would like to buy. Once the order is confirmed post online payment, the logistics, and supply chain team packs and send the purchased products to different cities. Our special packaging keeps the food fresh for 26 hours as it moves from city to city through our partner Spicejet and our delivery folks.”
Justmyroots proudly claims to be different from other web portals available in the market offering similar kinds of services. Sengupta says, “We deliver pure nostalgia in the form of food. While other food tech platforms deliver food within a range of 0 to 6 kilometers, we deliver perishable cooked food across cities within 24 hours of cooking.”
Direct from Home (DFH) service
The company is gaining more popularity because of its DTH services. Explaining further about these services, he says, “This is the icing on the cake. Mothers connect with us to send their home-cooked food to their kids or loved ones studying or working in other parts of the country. Our delivery team visits their home once orders are placed, and they do special packaging of containers that are collected from mothers. We ensure that all cooked food reaches customers within 24 hours of pickup.”
Food safety and storage of perishable foods
According to Sengupta, JustMyRoots uses specialized packaging from Israel and state of the art cold chain logistics where the food is transported at a temperature ranging between 5 to 8ºC. “The entire logistics are managed through a cost-efficient cold chain. When it comes to long-distance delivery, the food travels only by flight. To deliver the food to the individual’s doorstep, we have ‘Last-Mile Delivery’ service, which covers the last local mile and delivers the food.”
Sengupta states that their potential customers are from various groups – those who have moved from their home town, travelers who have tasted food in different cities and long for more, households where the kids are studying elsewhere and NRI’s who wants to send gifts (food) to their families in India.
Bringing smiles and connecting with roots
During this journey, the founders of JustMyRoots have come across many memorable incidents. Sengupta shares, “I can recollect when a customer in Bangalore cried over the phone after receiving Kheer from his 72-year-old mother staying in Kolkata. Another mother used to send food every week to her kids in Bangalore. There are many such stories.”
Things are falling in place
Regardless of its popularity, the journey has not been very easy for the founders. He says, “Our biggest challenge so far has been to convince both restaurants and customers that cooked food can remain fresh even after 24 hours. We offered them free deliveries initially to drive in the idea of fresh food. Even mothers were initially very skeptical that whether the food they were sending to their kids would remain fresh all the way. We struggled a lot in the beginning, but now things are falling in place.”
Justmyroots is actively expanding its reach, and recently they have started delivering food locally in Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar from cities that fall outside the range of 0 to 6 kilometers. “We plan to cover 240 cities of the country, and are aspiring to expand our services to the international level to cater to the NRI diaspora across the world,” Sengupta concludes.
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Naresh Khanna – 10 February 2025
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