India has spent the better part of fifteen years perfecting food delivery. We’ve built sophisticated logistics networks, expanded restaurant reach through aggregators, embraced cloud kitchens and, in the process, made ordering in a habit rather than an occasion. The pandemic accelerated that shift, but it didn’t create it. Today, whether it’s an office lunch in Bengaluru, a late-night meal in Mumbai or a family dinner in Guwahati, the infrastructure to move food already exists.
The next chapter of innovation may not come from moving food faster. It may come from rethinking the food itself.Hospitality has long focused on cuisine, recipes and service. Delivery adds another variable that deserves equal attention: the journey. Every meal now spends twenty to forty minutes in transit before it reaches the customer. During that time, steam softens crispness, moisture migrates, temperatures equalise and textures evolve. Yet recipe development in most kitchens still ends at the pass.Perhaps it shouldn’t.The restaurant industry often asks whether a dish can be delivered. A more useful question is whether it was ever designed for the journey in the first place.This isn’t about creating “delivery food.” It’s about recognising food formats.A format is different from a dish. A dish belongs to a cuisine. A format solves a practical problem. Pizza, burgers, burritos and Japanese bento have become global successes not simply because they taste good, but because they combine flavour, portability, consistency and ease of eating into a single, repeatable product. They survive movement remarkably well.India has never lacked portable food. In fact, our culinary history is full of it.Long before food-tech platforms existed, every region developed foods for travel, work and everyday mobility. Thepla stayed soft over long journeys because Gujarati traders needed food that lasted. Idlis held their texture because steaming and fermentation made them remarkably resilient. The kathi roll transformed a sit-down meal into something that could be eaten while walking. Vada pav became Mumbai’s defining meal because it was affordable, filling and entirely self-contained. Litti could be carried into the fields, while poha travelled effortlessly from the breakfast table to the lunchbox. Even the samosa, one of India’s most enduring snacks, owes part of its success to its architecture: a crisp shell that protects a complete filling.These foods weren’t designed by marketing teams. They evolved because they solved everyday problems.Somewhere along the way, modern hospitality stopped paying attention to those lessons.Instead, many restaurants approached delivery by placing dine-in dishes into takeaway containers and hoping packaging would bridge the gap. Better packaging certainly helps. But packaging can only preserve a product; it rarely transforms one. If a dish depends on immediate consumption to taste its best, the solution probably lies in redesigning the dish rather than redesigning the box.This is where Indian hospitality has an opportunity to think differently.Rather than asking, “How do we deliver restaurant food?” we could ask, “Which Indian foods already contain the principles of great portability, and how can we build on them?”That shift in thinking changes the design brief entirely.Instead of focusing only on flavour, chefs and product developers begin thinking about structure. How does the product hold together after thirty minutes? Does every bite remain balanced? Can it be eaten without assembling multiple components? Does it travel without losing its identity? Does it create unnecessary packaging waste because the meal has been split into too many containers?These questions are no less culinary than deciding the right spice blend or cooking technique. They simply recognise that, for millions of customers, the journey is now part of the dining experience.Interestingly, India has already demonstrated mastery in one format that often goes unnoticed: the tiffin. The Mumbai dabbawala system is rightly celebrated for its logistical precision, but its real brilliance begins much earlier. The tiffin itself is a thoughtfully engineered meal format. Individual components travel separately but arrive together as a complete, balanced lunch. It wasn’t designed for restaurant service; it was designed for daily life. That distinction matters.We can see similar thinking in the success of biryani. Year after year, it remains one of the country’s most ordered dishes on food delivery platforms. Its popularity isn’t only about taste. Biryani is inherently suited to the journey. It is a complete meal, layered rather than assembled, forgiving of travel time and remarkably consistent from kitchen to customer. In many ways, biryani succeeds because it behaves like a format, not just a recipe.The opportunity ahead is not to turn every Indian dish into fast food, nor to imitate Western QSR models. It is to recognise that Indian cuisine already contains the building blocks of world-class portable meals. The task is to study them, refine them and develop new products rooted in the same principles rather than simply reproducing restaurant plates in disposable containers.Italy didn’t export every regional speciality. Japan didn’t export every home-cooked meal. What travelled were formats…pizza, sushi, burgers, bento that balanced identity with practicality. India possesses a culinary diversity that is arguably unmatched. Yet we have only begun to explore which of our foods can become enduring, scalable formats for the way people increasingly eat today.The next breakthrough in Indian hospitality is unlikely to be another delivery platform or drones.It may well be the moment we stop asking how to deliver our food and start asking which Indian foods were always meant for the journey.Vikas Narula is a hospitality entrepreneur and the co-founder of Depot48. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of ET HospitalityWorld.
Dining and Cooking