Food Pixel, a new initiative!
It’s midnight, and you’re hungry. You haven’t saved up any food, and nobody has any food. What does an NITJ student do at this point? Order from the “Night Food Court” ofcourse! It is one of the latest services being provided by the creators of Food Pixel. In light of this development, we have decided to interview the creators of Food Pixel to get to know them, and the thought process behind their ideas better:
Food Pixel was created around 9nd March, 2018 by two students of NITJ. Ghansham from Chemical Department (Final year), and Shubham from Biotech (Final year).
The interview went something like this:
Correspondent: Can you describe exactly what you are doing?
Ghasham: Our main service is food providing, and our main target is on colleges. We are not limited to NITJ, either. We think there are only one or two major restaurants near/in each college, and they charge high amounts and give less quality. So, we want to connect all the food vendors outside of the colleges. Presently, we are also providing great service in Jaipur. We are trying to cover a large amount of the 10+ Engineering colleges, and 150+ hostels in Jaipur.
C: Where did you start?
G: We started off in Jalandhar, however, this area was quite compact. So, we moved to Jaipur.
C: What inspired you to start?
G: Our need inspired us. For example, in the last ten days before exams, there's a lot of crowd at the DS. So, no one can properly eat. Then, a person is forced to go outside. We wanted to eliminate that. We also provide options for pre-ordering, which saves a lot of time.
C: What was the idea behind “Night Food Court”?
G: Night Food Court is only a small part of our operations, and it only exists because of the demand. People, for example, my friends even, wanted food at night. So, we created a simple service to deliver packaged foods at night. This is only for user satisfaction and isn’t anything too special.
C: What is your vision for the future?
G: We want to expand in Jaipur, however since we started in Jalandhar. So, we also want to improve our service here. We want to improve our user base and get better funding to better develop our teams.
C: What are some of the difficulties you faced when starting this service?
G: The challenges are unlimited. However, the main challenge here is that it is a government college. So, we needed to get permission for everything, and we didn’t know how to do that, as it was the first time we were doing it. So, it took us a couple months to get the permission. At that point, we had talked to a couple of restaurants already, however, because it took us so long to get the permission, they thought we were joking and were just kids. So, they ended their connections with us. It was hard to convince all the vendors to collaborate and to make them believe we were a good service who could make them profit. Another big issue, is making delivery efficient. This is a problem Zomato and Swiggy have, as well. If one driver is 20 minutes late, because a customer made them wait. Then the next order is also automatically 20 minutes delayed, and that customer may cancel the order. So, making an efficient delivery system is hard.
C: How did you get the initial funding for your project?
G: We still haven’t gotten the initial funding. You can call it crowd funding in a way, but I got most of the money from my friends, and I saved us my pocket money. I took money from them, and my saved us money, and started this idea.
C: How did you make your “Food Pixel” app?
G: My partner, Shubham Gupta, from Biotech, is great at coding. He took about 10 days to make both, the app and the website.
C: How are you differentiating yourself from S-mart?
G: Basically, S-mart focuses on providing stationery with some packed food. However, we mainly focus on food itself. So, we provide both packaged and non-packaged foods. Also, S-mart adds a delivery tax, however we don’t do this. We sell our product at MRP.
You can download the food pixel app from the following link:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ezengineering.foodpixel.shubham
Food Pixel was created around 9nd March, 2018 by two students of NITJ. Ghansham from Chemical Department (Final year), and Shubham from Biotech (Final year).
The interview went something like this:
Correspondent: Can you describe exactly what you are doing?
Ghasham: Our main service is food providing, and our main target is on colleges. We are not limited to NITJ, either. We think there are only one or two major restaurants near/in each college, and they charge high amounts and give less quality. So, we want to connect all the food vendors outside of the colleges. Presently, we are also providing great service in Jaipur. We are trying to cover a large amount of the 10+ Engineering colleges, and 150+ hostels in Jaipur.
C: Where did you start?
G: We started off in Jalandhar, however, this area was quite compact. So, we moved to Jaipur.
C: What inspired you to start?
G: Our need inspired us. For example, in the last ten days before exams, there's a lot of crowd at the DS. So, no one can properly eat. Then, a person is forced to go outside. We wanted to eliminate that. We also provide options for pre-ordering, which saves a lot of time.
C: What was the idea behind “Night Food Court”?
G: Night Food Court is only a small part of our operations, and it only exists because of the demand. People, for example, my friends even, wanted food at night. So, we created a simple service to deliver packaged foods at night. This is only for user satisfaction and isn’t anything too special.
C: What is your vision for the future?
G: We want to expand in Jaipur, however since we started in Jalandhar. So, we also want to improve our service here. We want to improve our user base and get better funding to better develop our teams.
C: What are some of the difficulties you faced when starting this service?
G: The challenges are unlimited. However, the main challenge here is that it is a government college. So, we needed to get permission for everything, and we didn’t know how to do that, as it was the first time we were doing it. So, it took us a couple months to get the permission. At that point, we had talked to a couple of restaurants already, however, because it took us so long to get the permission, they thought we were joking and were just kids. So, they ended their connections with us. It was hard to convince all the vendors to collaborate and to make them believe we were a good service who could make them profit. Another big issue, is making delivery efficient. This is a problem Zomato and Swiggy have, as well. If one driver is 20 minutes late, because a customer made them wait. Then the next order is also automatically 20 minutes delayed, and that customer may cancel the order. So, making an efficient delivery system is hard.
C: How did you get the initial funding for your project?
G: We still haven’t gotten the initial funding. You can call it crowd funding in a way, but I got most of the money from my friends, and I saved us my pocket money. I took money from them, and my saved us money, and started this idea.
C: How did you make your “Food Pixel” app?
G: My partner, Shubham Gupta, from Biotech, is great at coding. He took about 10 days to make both, the app and the website.
C: How are you differentiating yourself from S-mart?
G: Basically, S-mart focuses on providing stationery with some packed food. However, we mainly focus on food itself. So, we provide both packaged and non-packaged foods. Also, S-mart adds a delivery tax, however we don’t do this. We sell our product at MRP.
You can download the food pixel app from the following link:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ezengineering.foodpixel.shubham
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