One taste of Yvette Kikuyu’s home-cooked gizdodo, an African speciality of chicken gizzard and plantain, was all it took for her coworkers to get hooked on her cooking. Since then the Kenyan, who has a full-time job at a Dubai recruitment agency, has been inundated with requests to cater for private gatherings and parties.
She is one of a growing contingent of amateur chefs who now have a new platform to connect with customers looking for delicious home-cooked meals.
Dubai-based Pakistani husband and wife duo Adnan and Asra Nadeem last month launched flyvr.co, a website that acts as a meeting place for home-based cooks and hungry customers.
While there are several caterers with an established client base, they are “buying and selling food through classified websites and Facebook groups”, says Asra, who tested the website on family and friends before going public. “We wanted to offer a single, easily accessible, one-stop space.”
With a team based in India, Pakistan and the UAE, the website now boasts more than 500 registered “home chefs”, mainly based in the Emirates and Philippines.
“We are focusing on the UAE and Philippines because we have noticed a demand in these segments,” says Asra, adding that more than 150 of the home chefs on the website are from the UAE.
A market for traditional flavours
Asra says the idea was born out of a passion for simple, home-cooked desi food.
“I grew up in Pakistan and Dubai, and food is such an integral part of the culture in both places,” says Asra, who used to work for bayt.com. “In the Middle East, about 70 per cent of the people are away from their homes and don’t have the time to cook,” says Asra. “Then you have people who move with their spouses to a new country and want to sell food from home. And there’s a big market for it. It’s a cultural thing, we [Asians] don’t like takeouts because we have grown up that way.”
It works like this:
A chef signs up and posts an advertisement before bookings are made. There is no cap on prices and chefs can determine the cost of each dish.
Once an order is accepted, the details of the delivery are decided, and the payment is collected by Flyvr.
“The chefs can decide how often they want to receive the payments – weekly or monthly,” says Asra. “There is no fee for posting or listing, but we charge both parties six per cent each per order.”
Asra points out that even with the inclusion of the service fee, the total price for a home-cooked meal is less than what you would pay in a restaurant.
“Each of our chefs gets at least three to four orders each week. It may not seem like a lot right now, but we expect demand to increase rapidly.”
Kikuyu’s gizdodo is one of several dishes she makes that are popular among African clients.
“I make it slightly different, with gizzard in pepper sauce, along with the plantains fried in margarine,” says Kikuyu, who sells a portion of plantain and 250g of gizzard for about Dh90. “You might get to experience a lot of different cuisines in Dubai, but you won’t find that on any menu.”
Become a home chef
Everyone who registers with the website is carefully vetted to ensure reliability and safety. All our home chefs are verified users whom we check ourselves,” says Asra. “We usually find them through social media or their food blogs. For example, if they are offering their services on Facebook, we contact them and verify their profiles, and speak to them personally to find out who they are.
“We have started conversations with Dubai Food and Health Authority officials and will be hiring a legal team once we get funded. Like AirBnB and Uber, we are only a platform that enables homecooks and small business owners to provide yummy and hassle- free food to people. Through our terms of service we encourage our chefs to have registered businesses to sell food and our pre-assessed and approved homecooks only invite guests over.”
The website allows any home cook to create an account, but they can only begin to advertise their services after the approval process, which involves a background check to find out if they are genuine, have an established business, the kind of food they are offering, and where it is prepared.”
The staff also offer tips on how to create an advertisement and attract more customers.
The future of Flyvr
Flyvr is set to expand across seven Middle Eastern countries, including Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, and its founders are currently looking for global investors. “Our biggest challenge is that some countries don’t have an online payment infrastructure, such as in Africa or South America. So we need to partner with local delivery companies and need the funding for logistic purposes, as well as to hire staff,” says Asra.
• For more information visit flyvr.co
aahmed@thenational.ae