An innovative location-based discovery platform is likely to provide the much-needed daily meal access to support COVID-impacted families across major Indian cities.
The first wave of the pandemic last year had a severe impact across the country with an estimated 55% of the households across 24 states and two union territories managing only two meals a day, indicating limited access to basic food supplies.
Families struggling with COVID-19 are often too weak to cook themselves, and struggle with access to help due to quarantine norms. While food and nutrition is key to faster recovery, that itself becomes a challenge. There are numerous home-chefs, tiffin services, and volunteers who have come forward to provide home-cooked meals in their neighbourhoods. Currently, their reach is dependent on word-of-mouth and multiple versions of messages, images and lists prepared and circulated in WhatsApp groups and social media platforms, making it hard for people to keep tracking at scale. There is an immediate need to have a simpler solution, where families can easily find these services near them and food-providers have a single go-to point to list themselves to make them searchable. Here comes the Innovative CoviFeedIndia.
According to Sakshi Aggarwal, who conceptualised CoviFeedIndia, “This is a tech-based volunteer initiative to connect COVID-impacted families and others who may find it hard to cook with the restrictions imposed by the authorities due to the rising cases. She said the location-based home food discovery platform has so far generated an overwhelming response from home-food providers, volunteers, and even the impacted families. The site, which went live late last weekend, already has over 100 volunteers and kitchens who have registered themselves to help provide food to the COVID-impacted families.”
“The second wave of the pandemic is hurting us all. If one family member falls sick, their home has to be quarantined. For affected families, cooking their daily meals at home becomes a real challenge. With our hospitals choked, we need to enable home recoveries,” she explained, adding that CoviFeedIndia is an attempt to help all these impacted families find affordable kitchen services during this difficult period.
Ms Aggarwal, who is the Head, Consumer & Market Intelligence at General Mills India Centre (GIC), is currently in the process of collaborating with Lakshna Chadha Jha and Amit Agrawal — the founders of sRide, a mobility app and Rohan Verma, the CEO of MapmyIndia. The idea is to quickly leverage their chassis for geo-location-based peer-to-peer solutions to address this urgent need across the country making access to meal providers faster and much simpler.
