Bayarea Dabbawaala(i)??,,,

An article featured in NY Times today caught my attention. Below is an excerpt from it.

Annadaata, which began as a homespun operation in 2002, has morphed into a business with several delivery people distributing meals each weekday across San Francisco. Kavita Srivathsan, 29, the chief executive of Annadaata, got her start by cooking meals for her new husband and his friends.

"I didn't know how to cook, and the first two months after getting married my husband and I went out to eat all the time," she said from her home in San Jose. "Two months later our credit card bills were out of control and we were both gaining weight. At the end of the day I just wanted the basic Indian food I had grown up with."

She did not have a job at the time, so she spent her time learning how to cook Indian foods. Using recipes from her mother in south India, she experimented in the kitchen for a few hours each day. On a whim, she advertised $5 box meals on justindia.com, a Web site based in the San Francisco area that no longer exists. "That was the only time I ever did any advertising," she said. "The very next day I got a few phone calls from people ordering the boxes, and from then on the word spread like wildfire."

Mrs. Srivathsan's business grew so fast that a few months later she decided she could no longer run it from her home. "It began as me cooking out of my kitchen, but since there was such a demand for it, I had to make it a legitimate business with a tax ID number and a rented kitchen," she said.

Because she wanted to reach a wider market and knew that Indians generally favored cuisine from their region, she hired cooks from various areas in India, including Gujarat, south India and Punjab.

Today, customers can click on her Web site, annadaata.com, to view a menu for the coming week. After choosing from among a vegetarian ($7), a nonvegetarian ($8) or a south Indian meal ($8), they place orders over the Internet and pay with credit cards.

It is interesting how entrepreneurial one can become in this valley. This is just a very small example of how a very simple idea can turn into a huge success. You just have to strike it at the right time. Hope mine is just around the corner..