A group of prominent entrepreneurs from India Inc. have come together to launch the FeedMyBangalore movement – an initiative of the KVN Foundation, created to prevent the daily wagers community of the country from starving to death during these challenging times. The initiative has been started by Venkat K Narayana, CEO of Prestige Group; Juggy Marwaha, Executive MD of JLL India; and K Ganesh, Serial entrepreneur and Promoter, Big Basket, Freshmenu and Portea Medical.
KVN Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation and the tagline for the initiative is ’No one goes hungry’.
About deciding to start this initiative, K Ganesh says, “On day 2 of the lockdown, three of us decided to take the bull by the horns and do something in our way to help in this crisis. So, our focus was the daily wage or migrant labourers who have lost their livelihoods. After two-three days, their ration will run out and it will be a challenge on how they will feed themselves. They can’t go back to their villages because movement is restricted. It’s an unprecedented situation and these are the people who are without any umbrella cover. So, we came together to start Feed my Bangalore.”
Their mission is to serve 15,000-20,000 meals every day to daily wagers, underprivileged and homeless children and frontline workers. Further to receiving an overwhelming response in Bengaluru, this movement has now been launched in Hyderabad and Mumbai, and will be launching soon in Chennai, Kolkata and NCR.
Venkat K Narayana, CEO, Prestige Group, says, “This is a social initiative that we have started on day 2 of the lockdown, to help the needy, especially the daily wage workers. We thought we should do our bit in order to help them. We started with 500 meals on day 1 and then more and more people wanted to join hands.”
In the last 11 days since inception, the movement has spread to different cities across the nation. Over 3 lakh meals have been served across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Mumbai and Noida. The backgrounds of the trustees have lent credence to this initiative, and reassured people that their donations will be used only to feed and help the children of daily wage workers and the most needy, to help them get through this difficult time. As a result, both corporates and citizens have come forward to donate generously.
Well-known personalities like Suniel Shetty, Anil Kumble, KL Rahul, Saina Nehwal, Mary Kom, Viswanathan Anand, Nandan Nilekani, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Athiya Shetty and several corporates including Paytm, FICCI FLO, HDFC Capital, Manipal Foundation, SBI, and the Bagmane Group, among others, have come forward to lend their support to this campaign.
“Since we come from corporate and startup background, we ensure that a standardised process is followed across the board,” says Ganesh.
All the meals are cooked in ISO (International Standards Organisation)-certified, FSSAI (Food Safety and Standards Authority of India)-certified industrial grade kitchens. They have been able to scale to 75,000 meals per day and look to go to 1 lakh per day very shortly by using industrial-grade kitchens, for which the entrepreneurs have partnered with a company called HungerBox, he adds.
HungerBox is a B2B food-tech platform, which ensures that in all the five cities, approved industrial level caterers supply the meals.
“We are in five locations, all with same handles: FeedmyBangalore, FeedmyChennai, FeedmyMumbai, FeedmyHyderabad, and FeedmyNoida. In all these places, we took the approach of a startup and how it scales. We wrote the full playbook and the same playbook has been used in all these places. Lot of things are done centrally here in Bengaluru and a lot of things are done locally. But what is noteworthy is the cooperation we get from the government, police, municipal corporation, NGOs for last mile distribution,” adds Ganesh.
FeedMyMumbai was launched on April 2 and has served 44,900 meals till date. Apart from this, FeedMyNoida was launched on April 5, while FeedMyChennai was launched on Tuesday, April 7.
“Besides institutions, individuals are also contributing because there is awareness among many people about what we are doing. We are working very systematically. We are working with the local administration on the ground and the police. The administrative help has been immense in all the cities, especially in Bengaluru,” adds Venkat.
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"We follow all the norms for hygiene, sanitisation and social distancing. We have a partnership with PayTm where we are integrated with them on the PayTm app and website. Our goal is to collect Rs 9 crore to supply 30 lakh meals till April 30," says Ganesh.