Making the perfect dosas is like hitting a 50-ball century in cricket—not everyone can do it. And for many, it is this reliance on individual brilliance that makes Indian cuisine unique. While this is good for cooking at home, it brings in its own set of issues for the restaurant industry: a dosa that costs Rs 30-40 in Bangalore set you back by about Rs 150 in New Delhi due to the lack of standardisation and absence of manpower.
Two foodies, Eshwar Vikas and Sudeep Sabat , felt that it was about time things changed. The duo, while studying in SRM University in Chennai, decided to take this up as a challenge and come up with a machine that could make dosas without human intervention. But the challenges began right from the design stage. They did not have any design experience and had to look for tools such as Google’s open source application Sketchup.
But converting the design into a working prototype was another big challenge. “We realised that in order to make the perfect dosa, we needed a dough dispenser that should rotate at one rotation per minute (RPM). The slowest motor we could find was one that had a 1,400 RPM speed. We went to many professors and experts in the industry but no one could help us reduce the speed. Finally, we met a mechanic in Chennai who never even went to college but could give us all the techniques and formulae to achieve our task,” said Vikas, 23.
The duo solved many similar challenges by picking up ideas from the streets and taking help from locals in Chennai. The founders, who started the venture in 2011 with a personal capital of Rs 6 lakh, made a working machine in a couple of months. However, even after getting the first prototype ready, it took eight months to get the first perfect dosa.
They then participated in a startup contest called VenturaFest in Chennai in June 2012 calling themselves Mukunda Foods and won the best business plan award. It was then Indian Angel Networks decided to incubate them. With support from IAN, Mukunda could reduce the weight of the machine to 40 kg from the initial 200 kg prototype and made it much smaller.
Hari Balasubramanian, CEO, Ontrack Systems and member of Indian Angel Network, decided to mentor them and helped them shift base to Bangalore to take advantage of outsourced manufacturing facilities here. “I saw a huge market for Mukunda Foods in north India and overseas. I believe they can easily sell 10 million units in next seven-10 years,” Balasubramanian said.
In October 2013 Mukunda Foods received a funding of about Rs 1 crore from Indian Angel Networks that helped them come out with the final prototype in January this year. Vikas has given the final prototype of the dosa maker to many restaurants for testing. K Ramamurthy, owner of Konark hotels in Bangalore, is among the first few customers testing it. “The machine does a great job in a very less time. We will be using this for catering services so that we don’t need a dedicated cook to make dosas,” he said.
Dosamatic, as the machine is called, is priced at Rs 1 lakh but Vikas is working on a smaller home version that he says will cost as low as Rs 5,000 and will be launched by next year. The company has already earned revenue of Rs 30 lakh in just three months, with an order pipeline of close to Rs 5 crore for the next one year.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> Business> India Business / Varun Aggarwal, ET Bureau / April 05th, 2014