By The Green Parent
08th August 2022
We live right across the road from each other! We’ve got four kids between us - I have two daughters aged seven and four and Renee’s sons are seven and five. When I was working as a TV Producer, life was super busy. Work, kids, childcare, schools, lunches, dinners, birthdays, holidays…. By the time it got to the end of the week, I didn’t want to make any more decisions, especially for dinner!
We’d settle on getting takeout and my husband and I would spend half an hour trying to decide what to eat. Finding a restaurant that had good vegan or vegetarian options was tricky. By the time the meal turned up it would be 10pm; too late to eat. The food itself was never as fresh or delicious as we imagined it would be. Plus, we were left with a load of plastic containers, which we’d feel so guilty about.
This got me thinking about the dabbawala set up, back home in Mumbai. Unlike a takeaway where you have to choose from an endlessly long menu, these delivery-only kitchens create weekly changing set menus of home-style food, so all you do is unpack and eat. And no guilt; you just leave the stainless-steel tiffin out to be collected next time around.
It was Summer 2018 when I started cooking from home as a trial for what would later become DabbaDrop. Renee was one of the first friends to sign up for the trial and loved it so much it was a natural progression that she came on board to help grow the concept.
The last year has been tough on parents. Balancing home-schooling and working meant there were a lot of late nights but we also got used to our partners being around a lot more which meant we could focus on work.
Now we’re slowly returning to normal, we’re working around the kids’ pick-ups and drop offs. It’s great having a co-pilot; Renee and I share everything, running the business and the childcare responsibilities. We take it in turns to watch the kids so the other can work. Sometimes we have to bring the kids into the office and give them some screen time while we catch up with our team but we’ll always balance that out with some run around time in the park afterwards.
Our customers are the reason we’re in business. Just an email from someone saying they loved our service makes us truly happy. Also very occasionally when we give in to a takeaway and it arrives in plastic packaging, we know what we’re doing is the right thing.
HOW DOES DABBADROP WORK?
We wanted to create a convenient, tasty takeaway option that didn’t come with a guilty conscience. Customers pay a one-off fee for the reusable dabba (tiffin) which is then theirs to keep. They choose a frequency (either weekly or fortnightly), pick their start date and they’re all set! Our delivery cyclists collect the customers’ empty dabbas when they deliver the full ones – and so the cycle (of reusability) continues. dabbadrop.co.uk
