eCelery: Cooking business from home! [Food/Vendor]

2015 May 5
Hey guys, I hope you're all enjoying this great weather we are having today!

This is my first post so I'll introduce myself. My name is Cyril Moukarzel, co-founder of a new Ottawa startup called eCelery.

eCelery, in a nutshell, is an online food marketplace where food lovers can order authentic homemade multicultural meals and have them delivered to their homes within the hour. What is different about our concept though is that all the meals offered on eCelery are actually being cooked by local chefs in their own homes. The chefs cook and we provide everything else from marketing, online ordering, to deliveries. Our main goal is to have different chefs specializing in a type of cuisine (Indian chef specializing in Indian food for example, etc). We want to bring tasty and diverse homemade meals to the takeout market while at the same time providing amazing cooks with the opportunity of running their cooking business from their own kitchen!

We are launching this business at the end of the month in Orleans and we are currently recruiting cooks for that area. If you know anybody that might be interested you can direct them to www.ecelery.ca/recruitment

Also, you can always contact me directly at Cyril@ecelery.ca if you have any questions or concerns (most people do).

Please like us on Facebook (eCelery) as well as Twitter (@eceleryinc). We are new and any support would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you!

Regards,

Cyril

2015 May 7
That's a pretty cool idea. Do each of the kitchens have to be certified by the city first?

2015 May 7
The people doing the cooking - are they actually trained chefs or home cooks?

2015 May 7
Thanks guys! We have been working on this fulltime for the past 4 months and have gotten great support and grants from Carelton U, Ottawa U and some government help.

We have a huge list of customers just waiting for us to launch so they can start ordering food!

Rizak: The kitchens do not have to be certified. The cooks we recruit will have to get their food handler certification course done (we pay for it and it is provided by the city, one day course). They have to get insurance though which we can help them with (we negotiated a rate of 69$ a month for up to 2 million dollars in liabilities). We are working fulltime with a food lawyer who is guiding us step by step with this process to make sure we are always on top of things.

Felinefan: The people doing the cooking do not have to be trained chefs, they can be home cooks. However, as part of the process, we get them to cook some meals, invite them to a judging event where a few of our judges will try their food, and they are then given a rating.

If any of you would also like to be a judge, please let me know!

Through our marketing efforts we are aiming to eventually get each chef or cook selling up to 30 servings a day which can help them make up to 230$ daily.

2015 May 9
uhmm, I would be a little concerned unless I know something about the cook and where they cook out of. Even certified restaurants have issues from time to time.

A bunch of our friends did a graduation dinner for us and family back in the old days of Waterloo and everyone who had roast beef (about half including my brother) end up getting Salmonella. Imagine getting the run while attending a graduation ceremony.

I also had friends who got bad case of food poisoning from improperly handled seafood.

One thing I would caution, I think you need to set expectation and specify where you would deliver for 60 mins or less and what area you would deliver in longer timeframe. Also you need some type of cooler or something for delivery coming into the summer. You cannot ran a delivery service of scale and be able to meet those delivery commitments.

Additionally, you should specify chef/cook rather than chef in your promotional material. I would expect chef to be trained and experienced and sounds like you are also recruiting home cooks who does not have training or experience in restaurants too.

What will you do about nutritional labeling and noting information for people with food restriction, allergy or dietary limitations.

2015 May 9
Thanks for the great feedback! Feedback like this always helps us constantly improve the business so I greatly appreciate it.

I definitely agree with your first point. For us, to build trust and mitigate risk as much as possible, every single cook has to go through a detailed process where we evaluate their cooking experience, if they have any education in culinary arts, etc. After that, we evaluate their food and that's done through an event that we hold where they bring in their meals and we have a panel of people (some of them food lovers like yourself, others are qualified chefs, food critics,etc). Once selected, we pay for their food handler certification course which is given by the city. On top of that, we would send an eCelery team member to inspect the kitchen on a quarterly basis.

Pictures, descriptions, and even some videos of our chefs and their kitchens will be available on eCelery for the customers to see. This is obviously to build trust. We will also be holding some events later on as we grow where customers get to meet the cooks.

Those are great points regarding the delivery system and you are absolutely right! How we handle that is we will be having a number of chefs per region (Orleans for example) and drivers responsible for delivering in that region. To start off, as a customer, you would only be able to order from cooks in your region making the delivery much faster. And you are right about the coolers, we have them in stock :)

We are aiming to recruit mostly qualified chefs (most of our applicants so far are qualified with experience in restaurants) but I definitely see your point and you are right we do consider home cooks as well. Thanks for that!

That's a very good point. Every meal on eCelery will have a list of all the ingredients in that meal so customers will know what they are getting. Also, customers will be able to write comments to the chef with regards to specific food, allergy and dietary restrictions. As we grow, we look to have all the nutritional information of every single meal we provide.

I hope this sort of clarified things a little more and if you have any more feed back I would love to hear it!

2015 Dec 9
Went to check out ecelery today and the website is down - what happened?

2015 Dec 9
"...new firms in the accommodation, food and beverage industry have some of the lowest
survival rates. Here entrants have only a 60% chance of surviving beyond their second year and only a 22% chance of surviving beyond eight years."

This is a bit dated (2000) but I don't think things have gotten any better for the accommodation, food and beverage industries in Canada.

Failure Rates for New Canadian Firms
publications.gc.ca

2015 Dec 9
Chimichimi I just surfed onto their website and got the following message:

_____________________________________________________________
Thank you for being an eCelery customer. Sadly, we will be stopping the service starting immediately. We will honor all existing orders that have been placed, but no new orders will be accepted.

We'd like to thank everyone we've worked with during this last year, specifically our wonderful team of chefs, who've taught us more than we thought possible about their culture and the food that comes with it.

If you have any questions, you can reach us at info@ecelery.ca
______________________________________________________________

That doesn't look too promising...

2015 Dec 10
I was discussing the concept of a food/cooking coop with someone the other day. I would supply fresh veggies and meats etc from the homestead in exchange for some great ethnic food cooked and even frozen. Ms K has a potluck at work and an Indian lady made an awesome dish and I tried to get Ms K to work out some bartering terms.

2015 Dec 10
Krusty,

trade some of your pork or sausage for the Indian food :D

2015 Dec 11

The city does not want people making food at home and selling it, same thing if you want to make soaps at home you are not supposed to sell them.

I remember looking into this a few years ago.

Cedars grocery sells some ethnic food they make, like Indian stuff sometimes. But I'm sure that is not the same.

2015 Dec 11
Yes, that's exactly the issue, did the regulatory pressures make it too difficult for this concept to work? No details on that though.