'Hygienic Packed Food Service For Students In Chennai'

By Savita Pillai / Chennai

Harried Parents Turn To Dabbawallahs To Design And Deliver Their Kids’ School Lunches Right At Their Doorstep. With most moms and dads out earning their bread and butter, it’s pretty ironic that it’s also one of the most common things packed into their child’s lunch box. The morning’s such a rush, cooks are such a fuss, say parents. Add frequent travel and work pressure to that, and there’s no time to think healthy or pack healthy. 
And that’s where the dabbawallahs have tasted their new market – in the school lunch box. Chennai-based MC’s Lunch Box, the brainchild of former software engineer Kripa Devi Dharmaraj, is possibly the first off the chopping block, targeting her healthy lunches at school-going children. “We have nutritionists and chefs on board, who have devised lunches based on calorific values and nutrition. It’s a complete balanced meal, packed and delive re d home before your child leaves for work , ” s ay s Dharmaraj, mom of a four-year-old herself. She adds that since most children these days are also looking for variety, Lunch Box, which works with a fixed daily menu, will offer global cuisines – from quinoa paniyarams to whole wheat pasta with soybean Alfredo sauce. 
    
Meanwhile, Anil Sharma, the man behind Jusfood, a Chennai-based website that connects customers to restaurants, seems to have also realized the potential in the area, after having received several queries from harried moms on the go. 
    
Vaishali Bharadwaj, one of the first mothers who called Sharma about the lunch box service, says though she is a homemaker, she has to fly to Delhi frequently to visit her extended family there. “My husband is in the shipping business, my parents are getting old, so I find it difficult to organize my son’s lunches when I am away,” she says. “Also, he wants to try different types of food and I need him to have a balanced diet,” she adds. 
    
“We will be launching our site Bitefresh in two weeks, which will offer set menus, all healthy and devised by chefs and dieticians, ready for delivery at homes and at schools,” says Sharma. 
    
But while the online dabbawallahs are going the scientific way, homemakers like Rohini Srinivasan in Chennai have been providing basic dal-sabzi-roti lunches for children to take to school. “I began by catering from home for senior citizens but then realized people were looking for basic healthy hygienic food for their children to take to school. So, I began catering to this segment too,” says Srinivasan, who adds that some parents who cannot wait till the lunches reach their doors, actually swing by her house on their way to drop off their child at school, pack the lunches she has prepared into their child’s tiffin box and then continue on their way. As for Srinivasan, she is up at 4.30 am to get the lunches for all the children ready, and that includes her own daughter in kindergarten. 
    
Chennai-based consultant dietician Dharini Krishnan says 30 per cent of the parents who come to her have questions about what to pack for the children’s lunches and whether there were any caterers who could help them. In fact, it was the queries that set her off on a pilot study in December 2012 on what children are bringing to schools for lunch. “I was shocked to find that every third lunch box had either refined carbohydrates or junk food. 

It was hard to spot the veggies,” says Krishnan, who adds that the pilot study is part of a larger multicountry one on school lunches. “And what was surprising was that the children knew it too. Some of the yo u n g e r ones did not want to open their boxes to show us what was inside and when we asked why, they said it was because they knew it was not healthy,” she adds. 
    
She also says that when schoolprepared lunches were compared with those brought from home, it was found that the former were healthier.