A fine Sunday and I get a message from my friend saying that she is heading to a blogger event. She insists I should come.
I should have gone a bit earlier man. I missed the presentation given by wonderful Divya about Frshly. When I entered the Owl Tech present at SP Infocity, I was pleasantly welcomed into a nicely lit office campus with naked brick walls. There I find fellow bloggers playing Scrabble with the most ridiculous rules.
Divya and Abhishek then lead us to the cafeteria where our object of interest was present. Well I am not talking about the food itself here.
I am talking about the food box, a kiosk that delivers nice hot meals within 90 seconds.
So you basically go to this stall present in your cafeteria, pick the meal that you like from their list, pay for it using any of the methods (includes cash and cashless transactions), and viola within a minute your piping hot food is delivered.
Oh yeah! I said hot. The food is microwaved before it is sent out. All of it happens inside this machine and you can even see the working of it from outside.
The food listed in their inventory is from leading restaurants that have partnered with Frshly. The neatly packed food packages are brought in and loaded in the vending machine. As soon as a particular meal gets over, it is not shown in the listing as well. So the instances where you pay for something and wait and after half an hour the cook comes out to say that whatever you paid for just got over doesn’t happen here.
I have had a lot of such events happen to me!
Me being the pure non-vegetarian lover, I went for the mutton briyani combo from The Engineer’s Briyani. As I posed for pictures while holding the meal I had to ask my friends to hurry up since the food was pretty hot and I couldn’t hold it like I was holding it.
The spill proof package is pretty neat and done using food grade plastic that has been tested and approved for heating purposes. There is a clear time stamp on the top of the pack along with a line that says “Please consume within 45 minutes”
What I love about this is that it is going to have the standard tastes of the restaurants and not the special disgusting quality of some canteen cook. No offence to such cooks who cook at big cafeterias, but after I saw this guy made bread omelette I had to think twice before buying food when I spot him in the kitchen.
While feasting on the sumptuous briyani which had mutton pieces that I was able to cut up using a plastic spoon, we had the pleasure of chatting with Satish Chamyvelumani, CEO of Owl Tech. He shared with us how he wanted to get decent food on long train journeys and how that shaped up into Frshly. He also mentioned that he wanted to make this one of the food options on the Railways. For now this vending machine is present at some of the IT campuses like DLF, SP Infocity in Chennai, at The Chennai International Airport (Departure) and also at some of the tech parks in Bangalore too.(Manyata, Eco Space, Divyasree Techno Park)
So next time you are craving for something better than your usual cafeteria food, go down to the Frshly machine, pick (you can also order via the app), swipe and eat.
You can follow them at Frshly Facebook Page or their Twitter Page.