Following Robin Cook's hailing of chicken tikka masala as the national dish, it seems fitting that an internet entrepreneur should attempt to launch a national online curry service.
Based in Reading, where the service is being piloted, the company's managing director, Sanjeev Joshi, is plotting to make everything from chicken korma to popadoms available at the click of your mouse button. Determined to introduce a variety of spicy tastes to the palates of web surfers, he plans to open 350 kitchens across the country over the next five years.
It is a highly ambitious project that requires tough deadlines being met every day and night. Known as Joshi's Kitchen, the web-based curry service aims to deliver curries within 40 minutes of an order being placed. They will be biked to customers' homes on mopeds. To make sure they arrive piping hot, the moped riders are going to be given about 12 minutes per delivery. Last orders will be taken online at about 1.20am.
Joshi is unfazed by the scale of the task. He says he has carried out extensive research and points out that orders arriving at the kitchens in Reading are climbing. There is also a backup to the web service. "We have a call-handling operation as well. You can phone a dedicated number and people will take your order in real time and contact our kitchens in real time."
Much thought has gone into the website, too. To make ordering easier, everything is contained on the home page. As soon as you arrive at the site you can place your order. Research into the latest shopping habits of web consumers has convinced Joshi's Kitchen that if it introduces too many different pages, potential orders will not be made.
All orders - whether placed electronically or by phone - are sent over the web directly to the kitchens. They are prioritised according to the time they were placed. "Our aim is to deliver a quality product," Joshi explains. He and his wife have spent a long time on recipes because the taste will be crucial to their success.
"I always find at a lot of curry houses that the taste is quite flat. It comes at you all in one go, rather than getting different flavours at different times." Analysts are sceptical about the success of this latest online venture and point to the experience of unsuccessful food delivery services such as US-owned Urban Fetch, which could not generate sufficient revenues from individual orders to make their e-business viable.
"It sounds like an interesting idea but I would worry about the eco nomics," says Mike Honor, a retail analyst for Forrester Research. "The curries have got to be out within 40 minutes, which means you're going to be up against the clock. I cannot imagine making vast amounts of money out of it." To supplement income, Joshi's Kitchen will also be selling alcohol and has plans to introduce an online gift shop. To protect its margins, customers have to make a minimum order of £8.99, which Joshi does not believe is an issue for most curry buyers. His main target market is office workers, who he believes will order curries from their desks at lunchtime or if they are working late.
To ensure that orders are fulfilled efficiently, Joshi has been carefully selecting his suppliers to make sure the supply chain is reliable. The company owns two kitchens in Reading, where the curries are cooked and delivered from. By owning the kitchens, Joshi believes he is in a stronger position to control standards. Another likely threat will be supermarkets, which already offer curry meals for customers to microwave. But Joshi believes he can compete on quality of taste which, he argues, is often compromised by large industrial cooking processes.
While the website looks refreshingly simple, Majestic, a Yorkshire-based design company, says it will be an enormously complex operation to manage orders and re-route them to available kitchens as the service grows. At the moment if you put in a post code outside the Reading area your order will not be processed. As more kitchens become available and more post codes are covered, managing the systems will become more of a headache Jeremy Gidlow, the design project manager, is already feeling the pressure. "It has got to be real time every day of the week throughout the night."
He says it has been challenging to synchronise the times on all the various interlinked computers to make sure that orders arrive with the right time stamps. Domino's Pizza runs an online pizza service that covers about one-third of households in the UK. A spokeswoman welcomed the entry of the online curry service on the grounds that it could help expand the market. She explained that one of the main benefits of web-based food services is that customers can browse menus online. "Mailed menus can arrive with a plethora of others and be thrown away."
Despite the potential pitfalls, Joshi believes that his recipes will carry the service forward. Not only are they battling against sceptical analysts but they are also engaged in a fight against the blandness of curry tastes. At the moment, as you would expect, life is hectic for him. Getting hold of Joshi is not easy. When I asked him a few days ago how it was going, he replied: "We've had an awful lot of orders for chicken tikka masala." So clearly the fledgling e-business is doing something right.
