Ever wondered where to go for the best Chowpatty-like Pav Bhaji in a particular city, or where to find Delhi-style chaat when you are craving for it, or wanted to eat at an authentic local joint when traveling?
The idea behind Talking Street is to help people discover popular, local food and distinct local joints when in any city in India, including street food, hole-in-the-wall eateries, unique cafes etc., which aren’t traditionally a part of popular restaurant & dining discovery platforms. Talking Street is, thus, a local food discovery platform.
While existing players in the food discovery domain help people find restaurants based on cuisine, dishes & location (filtered by reviews, ratings), Talking Street helps people discover food which is difficult to locate on these platforms. The popular street food vendor who has been serving a dish for years together, the local eatery that has people lined up or the café that lets you hang around for hours over a single cup of tea. Here’s an intro video that explains the concept.
Talking Street helps user groups like foodies, casual diners, travellers etc. Discover local / traditional / street food in a city by providing detailed qualitative content. All the food outlets listed on Talking Street are carefully curated by means of first-hand information collection, with a special emphasis on hygiene, popularity and superior tasting food.
This information can be accessed via a search and discovery engine on Talking Street, which answers critical questions like which places to eat at on a street and directions for locating the outlet. Users can browse through segregated content displayed for different locations, cuisines and even dishes.
Talking Street is gradually evolving into a product which will enable users to search, discover & share the happiness of local food via location-based services, as well as consume the food they search for, thus working on our vision of bringing the happiness of experiencing local food and culture.
The platform has a unique subset of foodies who evangelize its offering. There are street foodies seeking the best places to gorge on their favourite Pav Bhaji, Puchke or Papdi chat. There are travellers who are keen to soak in a city by eating at local eateries. Then there are users who have migrated to a new city and craving for home food or food native to their hometowns. Discovering simple joints that serve food that reminds them of home brings them delight. Talking Street is a Bangalore based startup. It is part of the Nasscom 10K Startups cohort and is based out of the Nasscom warehouse.
Currently operating in Bangalore, Talking Street has covered 80% of the Bangalore market with personally curated information listing 280+ outlets across 23+ localities and food streets. We will be touching 300+ outlets by October end, and also expanding into new cities.
Challenges:
Changing the mindset of the larger mass of users which is wary of consuming local food, especially street food, because of hygiene concerns, has been really challenging, but Talking Street is doing that well via a Hygiene index which is gradually evolving.
Currently, the hygiene index is a largely manual process, which involves ascertaining the outlet interiors and surroundings for cleanliness, and checking for presence of basic hygiene practices such as neat food preparation area, covering of prepared food, usage of gloves, washing plates used for serving etc. The presence/absence of these practices is aggregated to provide a hygiene approval and even popular outlets are dropped from the coverage list if they don’t meet our internal criteria. As we ramp up our technology we are looking to automate the entire process of hygiene approval by allowing users to comment / rate the hygiene standards of outlets they eat at.
All interns involved in the process of covering outlets are briefed in detail and usually asked to attend a coverage drive with Maheima, the founder, wherein she demonstrates how to select an outlet and decide whether to cover it or not, depending on the Talking Street criteria it meets.
As we try to grow and scale, our focus is as much on building the product as it is on building a great team which can support and carry forward the unique vision of Talking Street – a run against the mill concept with many evangelists.
About The Team:
Maheima, Founder.
Maheima is the founder of Talking Street and the key contributor for Bangalore. She can be spotted sampling street fare on different streets, attempting to get some interesting nuggets out of the vendors and clicking away at everything that comes her way. Maheima is a Physics graduate from Sri Satya Sai University and an MBA from IIM Bangalore. She has 9+years of work experience in marketing and related disciplines across organizations such as Unilever, Tata Global Beverages and Britannia.
Rupam Gogoi, Head, Product Development.
Rupam is an alumnus of Anna University Chennai & SRM University Chennai with an engineering degree in Electrical & Electronics Engineering followed by a MBA in Human Resources and is deeply entrenched in the Indian startup eco-system, having managed growth as well as products for other early stage startups earlier being a co-founder & team member, along with contributing to startup media resources. Currently he manages the product at Talking Street.
Siddharth, Technical Advisor.
Siddharth Mathur created smartphone software at Nokia and Nellymoser in the USA before moving back to India. He is the founder of Blackbuck Computing (http://blackbuck.mobi), a startup with the mission to make the mobile internet more fun and more enjoyable. An alumnus of University of Arizona and the University of Delhi, he is the technology advisor to Talking Street.
Naganand Doraswamy, Mentor.
Naganand Doraswamy has over 25 years of experience in the industry and is the president of TiE Bangalore. He is a successful entrepreneur with extensive experience in management and technology. As co-founder and EVP of SPAN, he leads engineering in R&D apart from providing strategic growth inputs across.