Meal’d: Sustaining a Lunch Subscription Business

In January 2021, the founders of Meal’d, a lunch subscription service based in Kerala, India, were waiting in a cafe to meet with a potential new business partner. They took off their masks and recalled their first meeting in the same cafe, which had led to the beginning of Oru Pothichoru (later renamed Meal’d) in 2017. Now, three years later, their idea had prospered; however, it had reached a standstill with the onset of the pandemic in 2020. The operations of the company had stopped completely in August 2020, and since then, the founders had been struggling to pay employee salaries. Prior to the pandemic, they had been on the verge of obtaining a sizable investment to expand into cities in neighbouring states. But with the recent drastic changes in the business ecosystem, they simply needed money to stay afloat. The founders had been deliberating over the possible alternatives for survival to pitch to the potential partner. Were they back to square one, or could they sustain the brand?

This case can be used in undergraduate or graduate courses on diversity and inclusion, gender studies, new ventures or managing growing ventures, entrepreneurship, strategy, organizational behaviour, and business policy. By working through the case and assignment questions, students will have the opportunity to do the following: <ul><li>Gain a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities faced by start-up entrepreneurs in the food and beverage industry.</li><li>Foster conversations about gender equality, diversity, and inclusion in the field of entrepreneurship, particularly the unique experiences of female entrepreneurs and the approaches they use to confront challenges in the business environment.</li><li>Understand the concept of entrepreneurial intention and explore the factors influencing entrepreneurial intention through the lens of the theory of planned behaviour.</li><li>Gain an understanding of the business model canvas and value proposition canvas, applying these tools to a food and beverage start-up.</li></ul>

• Food and beverages industry
• Gender equality, diversity, and inclusio
• Entrepreneurial intention
• Business model canvas and Value proposit