Ever since the explosive popularity of food delivery application Deliveroo, techies across the planet have been fighting to see if they can engineer a similar-sized change in our eating and shopping habits.
The South-East Asia region is foodie heaven for residents and tourists alike. Here are 5 startups in the region making delicious cuisine more accessible, more healthy and deliverable to your door:
Dahmakan
Dahmakan organisation calls itself the fastest-growing cloud kitchen startup in Southeast Asia and is the first recipient of YCombinator seed funding in the country. It aims to replicate the experience of home-cooked food, whenever people want, with free delivery.
The site boasts fresh local ingredients, ordered then cooked and delivered, around areas in the Klang Valley – the region of Malaysia which houses Kuala Lumpur.
Komravision
This handy little app can do all sorts of things to help people with the food they eat: it can scan for the sugar level, to help people with diabetes; it can analyse skin, fat, oil and water; it can check for the presence of particular food allergies; and it can check if medical pills received are counterfeit.
The Hong Kong company’s tool goes even further: it can even be used for soil analysis, inspections and customs, or to check the quality of jewels.
Komravision can check food with just one press, displaying results and extracting nutritional values in a clear to see way.
Cookly
Here’s something you may not yet have realised you wanted to do, but may form the basis of trips in the future: cooking classes whilst you travel! Cookly bills itself as the “world’s largest cooking class platform for travelling foodies”, offering its wares across 150 destinations. It covers areas further afield than East Asia but some of the flagship cities are in Thailand, Vietnam and South Korea.
In Seoul, for instance, there’s a three-hour market tour and cooking class in a traditional Korean house, or ‘hanok’. In Bangkok, users are encouraged to search by category of class — encompassing — pad thai, vegan or vegetarian option, or tom yum soup — or choose from a list of courses, including a traditional Thai cooking course at a Siamese Cookery with a Local Market Tour for £24.
Freshket
This Bangkok-based organisation is a food supply chain platform, aiming to help suppliers and restaurants find each other and buy and sell fresh ingredients with minimum fuss. Freshket has plans to penetrate Thailand’s main city.
Indy Dish
Most similar to food delivery apps like Deliveroo, this company helps professionals “eat right and stay healthy everyday” by delivering nutritious meals, including Thai dishes with no MSGs. Ordering takes place through LINE, a whatsapp-style messaging service, either on-demand or to a schedule.
Indy Dish‘s options include roasted chicken rice bowl with basil sauce; and a grilled salmon rice bowl with tom yum sauce. The products, again, are delivered in and around Bangkok.