Evolving infrastructure for food service on Indian Railways

[jis]

As I have mentioned before, Indian Railways did away with Restaurant Cars (Diners) many decades back, and replaced it with Buffet/Pantry service. On those trains where food is included in the fare, meals are served at ones seat. On the other trains meals could be ordered ahead for pickup at designated stations for delivery. There still was dissatisfaction with the variety and quality of the food served.

IRCTC is a subsidiary of Indian Railways that is responsible for providing passenger services. They have tried various subcontracting schemes, and the latest is with an outfit described in this article pointed to below. It turns out that the guy who came up with this is an almunus of my alma mater in India.

http://www.indiaretailing.com/2016/08/22/food/food-service/travelkhanas-pushpinder-making-train-journeys-delicious/

What this new way of doing things using the internet and smartphones is that people have access to a relatively large menu with quite a bit of variety. They are able to keep track of how the train is doing on schedule and arrange to deliver food from their large network at the station where the train willl actually be at meal time. So far it seems to be catching on.

Unfortunately this is going to be hard to do in the US because the network is too sparse to make it worth any of the food vendors while. It could potentially work in the more dense east, but there are other pesky issues like OBS union s etc. that remain to be dealt with.

 

[Metra Electric Rider]

Now I want butter chicken for lunch! I've just sent to the link to my consultant friend who travels to Delhi regularly - she'll love it!

 

[Bob Dylan]

Very informative and mouth watering, thanks for sharing!

When you retire from your day job perhaps Amtrak can hire you as a Consultant to come up with a plan to get their Food and Beverage Clusterflub straightened out! ( I suggest that the Burger be named the Mica Burger! )

 

[MARC Rider]

Unfortunately this is going to be hard to do in the US because the network is too sparse to make it worth any of the food vendors while. It could potentially work in the more dense east, but there are other pesky issues like OBS union s etc. that remain to be dealt with.

It might work if they marketed it to more than train travelers -- Motorists might be interested in having a greater variety of choices without having to detour off the highway to find interesting vendors. Bus travelers as well. I wonder if it could be extended to airports -- the choices now available for takeaway food at airports is horrible. On my last transcon flight I subsisted on a couple of pieces of cheese and some salmon jerky I purchased before the trip at Whole Paycheck. Felt like I was on the Lewis and Clark Expedition. I used to complain about airplane food -- that was before they stopped serving it.

I guess the actual serving to the passengers is done by railway OBS personnel, so I'm not sure they should be too upset about the change. The servers wouldn't lose their jobs, although it is true the cooks would. Just do a transition period, not hire any more chefs/cooks, and complete the transition when all of the incumbents have retired or otherwise moved on. You still need cafe car attendants to serve drinks, especially booze.

Of course, OBS service plus the cost of delivery from the vendor (which would need to factor in longer drives if the train was delayed and the delivery truck had to drive down the line to meet the train.) Thus, anything served on board is going to be more expensive than the same item at the vendor's own location. Also they need to think about how people without smartphones can make orders, and, also, there are great swaths of routes with no cellphone service or mobile internet. However, if they could spend some effort making the presentation nicer than your typical takeaway food and have it delivered to your choice of your seat, your room, or the dining car, as a passenger, I would like the idea.

This is sort of an extension of the chicken dinner in Havre/order pizza and pick it up in the station, the El Paso burrito lady, etc. How many vendors is this guy working with? Is he developing a standardized menu or is it the passenger's choice of any "diner, dive or drive in" that wants to participate? In fact, if you could get the best of the "road food" vendors and local restaurants along the route to join up, the possibility of riding the train and sampling the local cuisine might actually attract a new market of foodie passengers. That might not only help Amtrak's food and beverage bottom line, but increase the ridership.

 

[jis]

In India it depends on the train. On some trains it is IRCTC personnel who do the actual delivery. On other trains it is contracted out to other outfits to provide the personnel who do the delivery.

The trick here is no van with food chases any train. The TravelKhana platform tracks the progress of the train using Indian Railways' excellent train status system and projects where food needs to be delivered, and then forwards the orders of that train to vendors local to that location. Only on very rare occasions is a train abruptly delayed away from the projected time and a plus/minus say one to two hour window around it.

The innovation in this is to be the order broker connecting customers to appropriate vendors where the train will be at mealtime actually, as opposed to per schedule. This is exceedingly important in India since it is not unusual for the lowly third level express trains to run 4/5 hours late on occasions for no apparent reason. The attempt here is to provide food to folks even under such situation that meet their expectations in terms of what they ordered.

BTW, about people without smartphone, India has had a century old system already in place to handle that. This is just a layer on top of that and in addition upgrading the century old system of order taking agents to start using smartphones themselves instead of the traditional telegraph from the previous station.So in that sense it is an incremental improvement with a huge improvement for the consumers of the service.

There is usually a Buffet Counter agent on the few trains that have a Buffet/Pantry Car and they are pretty much all top of the line trains. Most trains don't. And alcoholic beverages are strictly forbidden on Indian trains, so selling booze is a moot point. People do sneak in their own booze onto AC First Class from time to time, but it is against regulations.

The article says that when the article was written he was working with 1600 vendors and growing at over 20% per year. He works with a standardized but quite varied menu. Remember, in India you have to cater to North Indian and South Indian cuisines which are very different, then both with vegetarian and non-vegetarian options. Beef and Pork are out since they are just asking for trouble. There has to be Western option and so on and so forth...

Of course all this still does not prevent you from buying whatever you want to from myriads of local vendors in and around any large station. It is difficult to do so without getting left behind if you are traveling by the crack expresses with few and far between 5 minute crew change stops and such. but on most trains you can taste as much local stuff as you want and also pick up as much local biological forms that you want with good or bad effects on you.