Editor’s Update 30/01/2020: We’ve been informed that Yumcious is no longer active.
Nothing beats a home cooked meal, I don’t care how many stars the restaurant is rated; at the end of the day, my mother’s food is something that I can never get bored of. I always joke with my mom, “Eh Mummy, why not you start a geng ze poi (economy rice in Penang slang) business?” “Hell no, so much work to do,” she said.
Passionate and experienced chefs are not narrowed down to only 4 or 5-star restaurants, they could be aunties who cook Char Koey Teow by the road side; annehs who sell putu-mayong on his trust old motorbike; abangs who sell Ramly burgers at your neighbourhood; or even your mom, grandma, dad who cooks under your roof.
Introducing Yumcious
Malaysian-based startup Yumcious is a community for foodies. As they’ve described on their Facebook page, “show what you’ve cooked, sell it, or get good food delivered to you”.
Founded by three friends, Elyas Zabidi (CEO), Rizal Shaadan (CTO) and Azam Ramlan (CDO), Azam shared with Vulcan Post that the idea for Yumcious sparked because they believe that good chefs come from everywhere.
“We also believe that great meals are crafted by great cooks and these passionate cooks don’t just come from restaurants but they are mostly cooking from their very own home kitchens. So we set-up Yumcious to be a food discovery platform where foodies decide and curate what’s best for the community via ratings and reviews,” Azam shared.
The general idea of Yumcious is that it’s a platform for homemade meals which gathers home chefs, foodies, and food couriers together. Any interested home chefs can register on Yumcious, to sell his or her meals. Then foodies who have registered on the platform get to have homemade meals delivered to them by registered transporters.
To put it in a simply, Azam said, “Anyone who cook can sell his/her meals on our platform. Buyers can buy the meals. Our delivery guys will pick the meals up from the cooks and deliver it straight to buyers.”
Currently the platform hasn’t launched yet. Azam shared that they’re still in the midst of setting up their page and social media. Speaking of possible challenges, Azam said they had minor coding problems which has been solved, however he admits, “We foresee more challenges to come when we start operation.”
Creating Job Opportunities For Foodies
Apart from being a community for foodies, Yumcious also provides a lot more job opportunities to those who are at home most of the time. They can choose to be their own boss, whether by cooking or delivering. For instance, chefs could operate an F&B business under their own roof effortlessly without owning a physical restaurant.
On the Yumcious’ homepage, they claim that chefs could earn up to RM10,000 via their service. Immediately, I asked Azam about this and then he did some simple Mathematics to clarify.
“A cook can actually earn a potential income of around RM10k monthly based on the following assumption; net profit per meal is RM9, 40 meals sold daily in a month (30 days). So RM9 x 40 x 30 = RM10,800.” Same goes to transporters whereby they could earn up to RM6,000 per month.
Verdict: 3.5/5
The concept reminds me a little of MakanSharing, a platform that unites food lovers with home cooks and budding chefs. However in this case, foodies don’t have to go to their dining space and private kitchen. The difference is MakanSharing would be more useful for events and gatherings, and Yumcious seems more practical for personal use, especially working professionals who want tasty home cooked meals but have no time to cook it themselves.
Azam said, “We want to build a vibrant community of foodies who buy meals from each other, we want people to think about food when they’re hungry, not restaurants.”
If the interest of the three consumer groups could be maintained, I’d say Yumcious is a concept that could work.
I am, however, slightly skeptical of the pay that is mentioned by Yumcious because that number is based on the assumption that a chef has up to 40 orders per day, every single day, for every single month. It is easy to come up with a number to use as an example of the potential money that one could earn, but the real deal is making sure that it is attainable. The work has been cut out for the Yumcious team, they now have to strive towards delivering that promise—and that’s a challenge the team is up for.