Tete-a-Tete with Rohit Gawli, CEO, Lokal Kitchen

How will you introduce yourself to the world?

I am Rohit Gawli, the Chief Executive Officer of Lokal Kitchen, a food-tech company focused on marketing, selling, and delivering home-cooked meals to households and offices. I am an engineer with over 5 years of experience in the technology and corporate sector, and I have worked with a diverse set of brands from TripAdvisor HQ to other hyper-growth start-ups that have a global presence now. Through the course of my career, I have managed and developed scalable businesses, with deep understanding of the global technology market and enterprises’ growing digital needs. As Lokal Kitchen’s CEO, I actively provides consulting expertise to all my C-level executives on a regular basis regarding strategic decisions and new ideas.

I launched Lokal Kitchen with my co-founder Rohit Mhatre keeping in mind two important aspects; create a value proposition for the growing Indian passion for home cooked food and address the social cause of women empowerment and entrepreneurship. Moreover, via Lokal Kitchen I wanted to unlock the real talent and culinary potential of millions of home chefs and help them become self-reliant.

In free time, I love to engage in activities like hiking, trekking and playing football. I have also completed my B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Mumbai university and & M.S. in Engineering Management (Data & Analytics) from Northeastern University, Boston.

Tell our readers about your achievements till today
Our app has achieved close to 10K Downloads in the brief period of first 5 months of operations, delivered over 500 orders, on boarded over 100 home chefs and we are now serving all the way from Colaba to Borivali in Mumbai.

Tell us about Lokal Kitchen, current initiatives, campaigns, etc.

Lokal Kitchen is a food-tech company focused on marketing, selling, and delivering home-cooked meals to households or offices with on-demand and pre-order as delivery options. Its technology platform optimizes food ordering and delivery by integrating web and mobile consumers with home chefs' phone-based application. Order management and optimizing the logistics partner is done via its delivery rider phone software.

Moreover, Lokal Kitchen was started with the idea of imbibing nostalgia through food. Food that reminds you of a place, person, or a scrumptious past affair. At the moment, we’re focusing on on boarding home chefs to provide more options to our customers, we’ve crossed a 100 home chefs with 20+ cuisines, in the near term we do intend to start a few marketing campaigns designed around the festivals. Also, we’re undergoing a tech transformation, coming up with a new user interface on the app for ease of use.

What's the most important thing that Lokal Kitchen is working on right now, and how are you making it happen?
The people at Lokal Kitchen are the most important thing to us, there’s a sense of family and purpose when we’re working on things related to Lokal Kitchen, be it on boarding home chefs, to providing customer support, and designing marketing campaigns.

What are the challenges Lokal Kitchen has faced post covid?
With the opening up of the economy, Lokal Kitchen did face operational challenges for e.g. in terms of logistics delivery time has increased due to an increase in traffic, but we’re working on getting riders assigned efficiently to help reduce delivery times.

What was the main reason to launch Lokal Kitchen? What market problem does it aim to solve?
There’s a huge need in the market for producing healthy and hygienic food that does not burn a hole in your pocket, also, the tastiest food comes out of someone’s home. So to capitalize on this concept, we started partnering up with Home Chefs who have been individual sellers for a long time and want to increase their sales.

Where do you want to see your brand in the next 5 years?
The vision of Lokal Kitchen is to be a household brand for customized items made by a homepreneur. We’re in the business of Mass Customization and not Mass Production, you have an army of talented home chefs at your disposal to cook according to your requirements.

Please share your learning for fellow entrepreneurs?
Persistence beats all odds, entrepreneurship is full of ups and down, so make sure you get used to it.