Small business, big dreams – it all starts with an idea
It’s 3 o’clock on a sunny Tuesday afternoon. Poonam Gambhir, is calm and collected while packing the 15th container of chole masala and roti. She then breaks into a grin and she breathes a sigh of relief. The last meal has been packed for the day. Mahmoud, the delivery guy stacks this package along with 14 others in the trunk of the car idling outside and closes the door with a definitive bang. He’s now ready to drive to Manhattan. “That’s it. All done,” Gambhir beams.
Poonam Gambhir in the Tiffin Blog kitchen located in Stirling NJ. Photo/Rashmi Raman
Gambhir, in her late 30s, runs Tiffin Blog, a prepared meal delivery service. Her office is a cheerful, homey kitchen in a small rented building in Stirling, New Jersey. Now in its fourth year, Tiffin Blog delivers to homes in Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn and the central part of N.J. The service specializes in homestyle Punjabi food, a north Indian cuisine characterized by the use of basmati rice, ghee or clarified butter and spices like garam masala.
She doesn’t have a culinary background. In fact, she trained in fashion design in New Delhi. She moved to the US in 1998 after marrying an attorney, who was already based in the US. She continued to work in fashion till 2005, the year her son was born.
While she found it difficult to manage parenthood and a full time job, she wasn’t keen to “sit at home” either. That is when she came up with the idea of getting into the food business. Hear the story of the idea behind Tiffin Blog in this audio clip.
Turning an idea into a business was easier said than done. It took her almost a year to register her company, find a space, arrange about $150,000 for financing and hire staff. Dolores Stammer is the Regional Director, New Jersey Small Business Development Center (NJSBDC) of Northwest Jersey, an organization that provides consulting services to small businesses in North West New Jersey . “Probably 18 months is more of a norm,” she says of the time taken to start a food business in N.J.
Stammer says that one of the biggest challenges of businesses like Gambhir’s is not knowing the rules and regulations. She says that start-up business owners come to her with questions about filings, to register the business, sales tax etc.
Sometimes, they may end up violating the regulations too. Stammer recollects the owners of a farm stand proposing to make pies with leftover produce. When they came to her with this idea, Stammer could not help but react, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, you can’t.” Stammer then had to explain that their idea violated Department of Health regulations at both the federal and local level regarding procurement of produce for commercial sale and disposal of leftover produce, something the owners had no idea about.
The Small Business Association estimates that small firms spend about $10000 per employee in a year on regulatory costs like environmental regulations, tax compliance, occupational safety and health, and homeland security regulations.
Jack Mozloom, Senior Media Manager of the National Federation of Independent Business, an advocacy group representing small businesses, remarks that regulations have to be “streamlined or even abandoned” as they are a “tremendous obstacle to growth.”
Gambhir says that her biggest challenge was raising money. Banks would not lend her the money for starting the venture. “In this economy, commercial financing for businesses under 2 years is almost impossible,” says Stammer.
But Gambhir persevered. She put in her savings; her husband pitched in as well. “I knew my idea was a good one and my research was solid,” she says. She knew next to nothing about running a food business. So, she had to start by going through sites and books. Then she had to figure out her target market – she zeroed-in on Asian Indian professionals and students.
She registered her business as TiffinBlog LLC, thus choosing the more popular form of incorporation to protect her personal assets from any liabilities the company might incur. The next order of business was to find a space.
It took her 4 months to find an appropriate place for her. She had no idea about zoning restrictions in Stirling. Every time she looked at a building, she would need to consult the Town Hall. She was also determined to avoid starting from a warehouse or sharing a kitchen with a restaurant.
“I wanted my own place, a happy space. [Not] a dingy place to cook my food,”she says.
She was driving by when she spotted a For Rent sign outside a small, boxy building. Fortunately for her, the owner of that building was the ex-mayor of the town and knew all the zoning laws. The law permitted running a kitchen on the premises. She saw this as an omen and signed an annual agreement almost immediately. Stammer, however, believes that Gambhir would’ve made her first sale sooner had she agreed to share a commercial kitchen with another business.
Staffing was another of Gambhir’s concerns. She did not want to hire professional cooks as she wanted to provide her customers with homestyle meals. And she had to keep it cost-effective. She prefers hiring US citizens or permanent residents over illegal immigrants. A friend recommended hiring Renuka Patel, who happened to live nearby.
Now, both Renuka and her daughter Shruti work at Tiffin Blog. Renuka moved to the US seven years ago and has been working at Tiffin Blog since 2010. Shruti, in her 20s, joined Tiffin Blog in January, soon after migrating to the US. “Achha lagta hai (we like the work),” they say while smiling at each other. When hiring them, Gambhir realized that they would need training as they were used to cooking Gujarati food, which is very different from Punjabi food.
Gambhir also has a few women on retainer. If it’s a busier week than usual, she calls them in to help with the cooking. They earn the same hourly wage as the regular staff and are paid by check.
For Shruti, working at Tiffin Blog is relaxed compared to her other job, as a cashier in a ShopRite supermarket. She earns about $200 per week in both jobs but her hours at ShopRite are longer. She also likes that she gets to spend time with her mother while working at Tiffin Blog. Renuka finds the schedule convenient and feels that the only time consuming aspect of the job is washing dishes and containers.
Mahmoud, who delivers the meals, likes working there because this is a “family business.” He makes around 15-20 deliveries daily. “The only stressful part of this job is the traffic,” he chuckles. He generally works from 3PM to about 9PM, which suits him.
Delivery days are Monday to Thursday. Friday is reserved for shopping. Gambhir and Mahmoud travel to Edison, N.J. to buy ingredients from the Indian supermarkets. After that it’s chopping, grinding of spices and pastes and other prepwork.
Gambhir discusses the optimal delivery route with Mahmoud. Mahmoud says that discussing the route beforehand makes his job simpler. Photo/Rashmi Raman
Gambhir designs the menu herself. Certain items, like the chole masala and the masala chicken are repeated more often as they are more popular. She uses her grandmother’s recipes. Her mother, who taught Home Economics in New Delhi has helped her improve the recipes. In the beginning, Gambhir also consulted a nutritionist to ensure the calorie measure of the dishes. She wanted to avoid preparing Punjabi food in the traditional way – dishes laden with a high fat content.
Customers can order meals on the phone or online. Most of her customers are Asian Indian professionals with families or students, says Gambhir.
80 percent of her customers prefer the seven-meal package priced at $45. A quarter of her costs are for raw ingredients and a further 65 percent or about $5500 are fixed costs like salaries, insurance, utilties and rent. Her gross margin is around 30 per cent or around $15. “I am making money, I can’t complain,” she says.
If there is one thing she could complain about, it would be the economy. Her business took off in 2007 and she began to consider expansion. But then the financial crisis of 2008 struck. A lot of her customers, especially those employed by Bear Sterns and the Lehman Brothers, lost their jobs. And she lost about a tenth of her business. “It’s much better now,” she says. She is able to grow at about 10 percent annually. It is less than what she expected and the idea of a second kitchen has been put on the back burner.
A large portion of her business is generated through word of mouth publicity. But a lot of her non-Indian customers signed up after they found her ad on Google. She is still cautious about advertising on Google and considers it to be a learning experience. So far, she has spent about $275 on Google ads.
Raj Camnani, 46 is a venture capitalist who lives in Shorthill, N.J. He found Tiffin Blog using a Google search 2 years ago. He was initially “skeptical”, but decided to try the service for 3 weeks. Now, he orders his favorite Mutter Paneer, Rajma masala and Palak Paneer regularly. “There is a real need for this kind of service in this part of N.J. I have also recommended the service to my friends,” he says.
Interestingly, her main competitor has a similar name. Tiffin Foods U.S., based in Long Island, also specializes in Punjabi food. Tiffin, a word coined by British colonials in India, is a light meal. It also means the container used for packing the meal – imagine a multi-tiered bento box. Tiffin Foods did not respond to requests for comment.
Gambhir believes that the quality of her food provides her with the edge. Vasundhara Gupta, in her 50s, is a marketing professional who lives with her husband and daughter in Queens. She works long hours and has to travel frequently. She heard about Tiffin Blog from a friend almost 3 years ago and decided to try the service. “Most maids cook Gujarati food, which I am not too fond of. The food [at Tiffin Blog] is like ‘ghar ka khana’ (home-style),” she says.
Besides delivery of prepared meals Tiffin Blog also provides catering services for small parties and get-togethers. It benefits from its location as there are a lot of offices in the area who put in orders.
Gambhir is still looking to expand the business by introducing services in central and southern NJ and other boroughs in New York City including Queens. Perhaps, in time, she could own a second kitchen too.
Winters and festivals are a good time for the business. The weeks imediately after Diwali (generally mid-November) and summer are the slowest.
“Running a food business is tough,” she says. She believes that she has made up for her lack of experience with a lot of hard work and research. But some factors are beyond her control. Like the recent snow storm during the weekend that disrupted the business; there was no power, and the roads were icy. The staff found it difficult to get to work, the kitchen could not run for the usual number of hours and deliveries took longer.
Gambhir packs the meals to be delivered. As part of quality control, she checks every package. Photo/Rashmi Raman
She is very much involved in the day to day operations of the business. Besides planning the menus, she carries out quality control by getting the food tested regularly and purchasing the packing materials herself, packing the meals and consolidating the orders. If she is shortstaffed, she also does the cooking. Running a business for her is all about “taking an idea and making it work everyday.”
“It’s a rewarding experience,” she says. “This is my baby.”
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