Recently, Indian takeaway giant Zomato launched the unprecedented "10-minute food delivery" service. CEO Goyar said: "So far, no platform in the world has been able to deliver fresh hot food on a large scale within 10 minutes. We aspire to be the first. After the news was released, it triggered heated discussion among netizens and was criticized for disregarding the safety of riders.
If Zomato's takeaway form is an Internet product based on applications. In India, there is also a takeaway system that has existed for 132 years, but does not rely on computers and mobile phones, and only relies on manpower maintenance, which is unique in the 21st century when high technology is widely used in various industries.
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The person who delivers the box lunch
At the beginning of each morning, small teams appear in the Indian port city of Mumbai, wearing conspicuous white uniforms and Gandhi hats, scattered around the outskirts of Mumbai to collect their goods, then regroup at the local train station, follow the railway network into Mumbai's commercial center, and then, by bicycle or on foot, to the office building or various factories, complete the delivery on time, and then go home. The next day the same work began to be repeated.
Who is this group of mysterious people who carry a home-cooked lunch through most of the city and deliver it on time?
They share a common name: Dabbawala, which means the person who delivers the box lunch.
Over the past few years, specialty foods have been delivered to guests' desks through online food delivery companies, and globally, it seems to be a matter of course. But India's Dabbawala has been doing this for 132 years.
A 2010 Harvard Business School study rated the dabbawala as a "Six Sigma," meaning that the dabbawala had fewer than 3.4 errors per million transactions. Approximately 200,000 customers come and go every day, which means that just over 400 deliveries are delayed or lost in a year.
It is worth mentioning that the dabbawala does not rely on any modern technology, the personnel composition is extremely low- and literate, but it can undertake such a huge delivery volume, punctual and efficient, even in extreme weather, there are few delays.
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The history of the dabbawala is traced
The practice of dabbawala, which transports lunches from workers' homes to offices, originated in the late 1800s.
In 1851, India's first passenger rail line was opened, connecting Mumbai with the neighbouring town of Thana (now Thana). During the American Civil War, Mumbai became the world's leading cotton trade market and contributed to the city's prosperity. However, after the end of the American Civil War, the ensuing economic collapse and falling cotton prices brought this prosperity to an abrupt end.
However, in 1869, the Suez Canal opened, and Mumbai became one of the largest seaports in the Arabian Sea. Indian textiles have also entered the global market, contributing to the economic recovery. Meanwhile, Indians from all over the world are pouring into Mumbai in search of jobs in factories and offices in the city.
More and more people are moving to Mumbai, but local fast food and canteens are not common, and most workers have to go to work early, wives have no time to prepare lunch, and many workers have to work hungry. Some workers try to bring lunch to work, but carrying bulky lunch boxes is very inconvenient during a crowded commute.
Another point is that because the workers come from all over the world, everyone's cooking habits are different, and the outside meals are not used to eating, and only traditional home-cooked meals can satisfy their tastes.
It is said that one day in 1890, a local named Bachi was entrusted by a Parsi banker to go to his house to get lunch and deliver it to his downtown office. In this way, Baggy identified business opportunities and began to accept delivery requests.
When he couldn't meet the demand on his own, he formed his own delivery team. From the first few years of steady growth of hundreds of people, eventually became a part of the local takeaway system. Initially they only provided lunch boxes for upper- and middle-class workers, but later began to expand the scope of services and began to deliver meals to lower-class workers.
In 1930, Bachi formed an informal organization, The Dabbawala, and began to provide services with standardized workflows. In 1956, a charitable trust was registered. In 1968, the Lunch Service Association was founded. Today, The Dabbawala employs about 5,000 people and delivers between 175,000 and 200,000 lunch boxes a day.
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5,000 people deliver 200,000 lunches a day, how to do it?
Every morning between seven and nine a.m., the dabbawala collects lunch boxes from customers' homes far away in the suburbs and transports them to a special sorting center at the local train station.
Each station has 4 groups of staff, each group of 20 people, each person can carry 35-40 lunch boxes, a total of about 75 kg. This means that a station can handle about 3200 packs of lunches per day. The box lunches are sorted by region, and then re-sorted according to the location. The sorting process typically takes 10-15 minutes.
The packed lunch will be placed in the designated carriage of the train, and the delivery man will arrive at the train station at 10 o'clock, and then deliver the lunch to the waiting delivery staff at various stations along the line with the lunch box. The person in charge of delivery will walk or ride to deliver lunch to the customer's workplace by 12.
Many office buildings have a dedicated elevator at lunchtime to facilitate dabbawala's delivery by 1 p.m. After lunch, a staff member reverses the process, collecting empty lunch boxes and sending them back to the customer's home.
This whole process is not supported by any modern technology and is not supported by huge sums of money. "Our heads are computers, and our Gandhi hats are umbrellas for shade from the sun and rain," dabbawala said. "While lunch boxes can change hands as many as 5 times on a journey from home to office, the reliability and accuracy of the organization is unmatched by almost any delivery service in the world."
Laganat Metch, the current president of the Dabbawala Association in Mumbai, explains, "The locals trust the people who deliver box lunches, and they even put money, train tickets, pens that their husbands forgot to bring, or glasses and all sorts of things into their lunch boxes. Sometimes couples quarrel, and the wife will send a note to apologize. We send everything. ”
This slightly "old-school" relationship of trust has even caught the attention of economists and business managers around the world. People try to understand the organizational structure and management methods of the dabbawala, even in the classroom of the University of California Business School, to analyze teaching.
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Demystify the dabbawala operating system
The staff of this organization are mostly uneducated workers, so how did they achieve such a high level of accuracy with such low-tech operations?
The answer lies in the distribution network of agencies, based on a limited number of central radiation systems, and teams that are very familiar with a particular area. This distribution system has even been borrowed by many takeaway and logistics platforms in the Internet era. Swigy, which owns about half of india's food delivery platform market share, learns from The Dabbawala; another B2B logistics company, Runner, turns to The Dabbawala to improve the map — Mumbai's neighborhoods are so intricate that Google Maps can't navigate the end as the Dabbawaras.
Another important factor is the unique coding system for marking and tracking lunch boxes. Because most of the staff are illiterate or semi-illiterate. Lunch boxes are marked in several ways: abbreviations for collection points, color codes for starting stations, station numbers for destinations, markings for processing at destinations, buildings, and floors, etc.
In addition, it is worth mentioning that the company organization of the dabbawala itself. Despite its sheer size and complex system, the management of the dabbawala is very flat, only at that level. At the highest level is the Board of Governors, which consists of the President, Vice Presidents, Secretary General and Treasurers and several Directors. The staff on the middle floor, who manages the sorting center at the train station, will help everyone mark lunch boxes while guiding new employees and resolving disputes. The last layer is the delivery man, who is not an employee, but an independent contractor. They need to pay 30,000 rupees (about 2,539 yuan) as a membership fee, and then pay a membership fee of 150 rupees (12.7 yuan) per month, work at least 6 days a week, and earn at least 5,000 rupees (about 423 yuan) per month. According to local Indian standards, this salary is very reasonable for people who have not or cannot complete their education.
In addition, the company will provide a fee of 5,000 rupees, enough for employees to buy 2 bicycles, 1 wooden box for lunch boxes, and the iconic white uniform. If there is absenteeism, delivery errors, non-uniform, smoking, etc., they will be severely punished by the association. If there is a loss such as drinking while on duty, or there is theft of the box lunch, the customer can deduct or reduce the fee by himself. In general, however, the Association has improved the punctuality and reliability of its services in a spirit of encouragement and friendly competition. In addition, because the dabbawala is a prestigious business, everyone is a partner of the company rather than a worker, which gives the staff a sense of independence.
After more than a century, the dabbawala has survived and prospered in economic turmoil, maintaining an annual growth rate of 5%-10%. In recent years, companies have also begun to adopt modern technology, create websites, and offer ordering services for text messages. Whereas in the past, people relied heavily on personal networks to find and maintain customers, but now through the SMS system, up to 15 new users can be acquired every day, driving further growth in the industry.
In addition, the association's website accepts donations as a way to create social security payments to pay members' medical and life insurance.