Cook With a Chef

COVID-19 has not been kind to restaurants and has resulted in loss of demand due to forced closures and limited capacity operations. A lot of Asian restaurants are not set up for a takeout/delivery model. The changing consumer behaviors present huge opportunities for them to explore alternative models rather than optimizing for takeout and delivery. People have more time on their hands, are looking to pick up new hobbies, are exploring new ways to take care of mental health, are shopping locally, and feeling the need to belong. Our solution, Cook with a Chef, presents a business model that allows customers to source ingredients from their favorite Asian restaurants to learn in real-time with a chef to accurately and authentically cook their favorite dishes. The solution goes beyond just the basic cooking and eating needs by satisfying the emotional and social needs of the consumers. The Cook with a Chef program can be decoupled from ingredient sourcing, takeout, and online classes, resulting in multiple revenue streams. The solution is hyper-localized while also being flexible enough to be expanded nationally and internationally post-COVID. While we do have direct competition from restaurants and meal kit services and indirect competition from other entertainment sources and DIY cooking tutorials, currently there is no one-stop-shop offering our unique solution. The solution is aimed at millennials who are comfortable with operating online and families looking for new activities to keep themselves busy. Our target audience consists of people in urban cities with disposable incomes. Our solution enables social distancing and increases mental health for our potential customers while connecting them with the local community. The solution can be pulled off without much risk and very few new costs or activities. We plan to leverage the current supply chain and the distribution can be executed using existing resources or through new contractors. This solution can be pulled off without much cost by leveraging free-to-use social media, video call, and e-commerce websites and applications.

Next steps for Cook With a Chef could be scaling to several communities and creating an app or platform that hosts multiple restaurants to increase accessibility.