When we think of apps like Uber Eats, Deliveroo or Glovo, it seems logical to think that they are recent technological inventions, right? But no, my friends, we’re dead wrong…
There is a lunchbox delivery service in India that transports around 200,000 meals a day, without using any modern technology. Although it is present in other cities, it is in Mumbai where this service reflects its grandeur. They are known as “dabbawalas”, a word that literally translated from Hindi means “those who carry a box”.
It is a complex and efficient delivery system that has become fully integrated into the city’s culture. The concept originated more than a century ago after British rule. Many British arrivals in the colony did not like the local Indian food, so a service was created to bring Western-style lunch to their offices.
Delivering lunch boxes in Mumbai
Today, many workers in Mumbai have to leave home early to make a long commute to their place of work. There is certainly no time to think about what to take for lunch and going to a restaurant is often more expensive. So many of them rely on the delivery service. It is usually up to the family mother (or home cook) to prepare a full meal and pack it in the lunch boxes, which in Hindi are called dhabba or tiffin.
That’s when the work of the dabbawalas begins. They go out on their bicycles to collect the lunch boxes from the houses in the neighborhood that each one has pre-assigned. They then bring the dhabbas to a place where they are sorted into groups, marking the lids with signs identifying the destination station, as well as the delivery address.
The next step is to deliver the lunchboxes to their corresponding workplace. The delivery men almost always travel by train, and there are even designated wagons for them. At each station, the baskets are handed over to a local dabbawala, who delivers them. A little later, when the office workers have finished their meals, the dabbawalas collect the lunch boxes to return the empty container to each house. The next day, the process is repeated.
Efficiency guaranteed without state-of-the-art technology
As we said, this lunchbox delivery system in India handles about 200,000 meals every day, with about 4,500 delivery men. The local dabbawalas know their customers personally and move confidently around an area they know well.
Many are barefoot and some can barely read and write, but the service runs with incredible punctuality. Even on days of extremely bad weather, as it is often the case during the monsoon season in Mumbai. The service is only suspended for five days in March, when the delivery men return to a village near Pune, which is where most of them come from.
Such is the commitment of these men to their hard work that even The Economist magazine mentions them as an example of management. Incredible as it may seem, according to a recent Harvard University study, only one error has been found in every 16,000,000 deliveries. This means a 99.9999% efficiency!
Fantastik’s lunch boxes
The story of the dabbawalas has always fascinated us and that’s why we were eager to bring directly from India the typical lunch boxes used daily by a lot of people. Currently you can find two models in our store, the more robust model, in stainless steel, and the smaller aluminum model, perfect for storing spices with style.
