Summer of Startups Feedback – SRC

Himanshu sent us an application for his team, SRC. Their team consists of two students based in India, who both study in IIT Delhi, making them some of the top tech students in India. Here is my feedback on his submission.

First of all, I have to say I’m impressed by your resourcefulness. Very few people monitor what’s possible to help their early startups, fewer actually dare to apply, and even fewer are abroad.

1. Problem
Lack of food-warming facilities during its transportation resulting in its degradation and loss of nutritional value. For eg. As in pizza home delivery business.

I can see how that is a problem. However, I would need better examples of business implementation. In the case of pizza, they’ve always arrived within 30 minutes and this has never been a problem. I know Pizza Hut in France has special carton boxes which help also. Sometimes food is also delivered in aluminum foil. However, maybe this is different in India and China, where traffic can be a real pain? Or maybe your solution can be cheaper than using specific carton or bag wrappings?

I would need to see:

- are there cases where this is a real problem?

- in those cases, will the pain be enough to drive towards buying your product?

2. Solution
The first stage will focus on development of a heating assembly which can be installed on pizza delivery bikes and use exhaust gases as the energy source.

Ok, that sounds like a cool technology idea. After all, Nokia recently released the charger for bikes. I really need to see business applications though! Why only sell something like this to pizza delivery for example? are there consumer cases? or other types of services that require transportation which could use this?

3. Profitability
Will tackle the huge problem of food degradation during its transport & will fulfill needs of a very huge market, especially in developing countries like India in a sustainable way by recycling the waste gas effluents from vehicles. Thus, helps environment.

You insist again on the importance of food degradation in developing countries. I would really love some numbers there, and again some way of knowing this is a real problem people are willing to pay for.

Also, it would help to know if this technology can be adapted to other vehicles or use cases.

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Published:
6.19.10 / 2pm
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