Six in the morning in the Gandhi Nagar kitchen
Rice at seven, tasting at ten and carriers out by half past eleven: a working morning, hour by hour.
What ₹120 a meal actually pays for
Rice, dal, vegetables, oil, the rider and the steel carrier: a plain breakdown of our veg lunch.
People who compare our veg plan with a restaurant meal or a delivery app often ask how we manage ₹120. Others ask why it is not cheaper, since it is home food. Both are fair questions, so here is how the money is spent.
Ingredients take about ₹48 of each meal. That includes around 150 g of raw ponni rice, toor dal for sambar, two vegetables bought fresh every morning at the Thiruvanmiyur market, tamarind, curd, cold-pressed groundnut oil and the masalas we grind ourselves. Vegetables are the part that changes most; in the monsoon, beans and carrots can double in price for a few weeks, and we absorb that rather than changing the plan price.
The kitchen team is next, at about ₹30 a meal. Four cooks and two helpers start at 6 am and finish at 3 pm after cleaning. Delivery adds around ₹22. Our riders do two rounds, picking up yesterday’s carrier and dropping today’s, and are paid per route plus fuel. The steel carrier and washing come to about ₹5 a meal across its life.
The remaining ₹15 covers rent for the Gandhi Nagar kitchen, gas, electricity, water, the WhatsApp line and our margin. We do not add a delivery fee or packaging charge on top. A delivery-app thali may look similar in price, but it usually comes in plastic, is cooked in larger batches earlier in the day, and adds a delivery fee at checkout.
