By Cara Waters
EACH week day in Mumbai some 5000 tiffin-wallahs set off by bicycle across the city to deliver office workers their lunches.
Now tiffin-wallahs have come to Melbourne in the form of the brightly coloured tricycles of Tiffins Melbourne.
Food to go: Kedar Pednekar operates a pedal-powered lunchtime curry delivery serviceCredit: Jason South
The logistical miracle which is the tiffin delivery system in Mumbai involves the tiffin-wallahs picking up home-cooked lunches stored in stacked metal containers known as tiffins from each worker's home.
The lunches are sorted at railway stations using a system of numbers, colours and symbols that are hand-painted on the tiffin boxes because many of the tiffin-wallahs are illiterate.
Kedar Pednekar delivers some tiffin boxes.Credit: Jason South
They are then transported to the centre of Mumbai where each tiffin box is reunited with its owner at their desk.
Mumbai's tiffin delivery system has won international acclaim from Forbes magazine, which awarded the humble tiffin-wallahs a Six Sigma performance rating, a term used in quality assurance if the percentage of correctness is 99.99966 or above.
Forbes calculated that for every 6 million tiffins delivered, only one failed to arrive.
In Melbourne, Kedar Pednekar, the owner and manager of Tiffins Melbourne, has put his faith in new technology rather than hand-painted colour coding to ensure tiffins are delivered on time.
Just as in Mumbai, Tiffins Melbourne delivers traditional Indian food in tiffin boxes by bicycle direct to hungry workers' desks. The difference is that curries are ordered over the internet, prepared in a commercial kitchen and deliveries are co-ordinated using personal digital assistants.
The business received a small-business grant from the City of Melbourne to install a fully integrated electronic order tracking system, which Mr Pednekar says has cut down on costs, paper and waste.
Although the Tiffins Melbourne business was initially launched four years ago, it closed down in February last year to implement the new technology and was started up again by Mr Pednekar in October.
Mr Pednekar is from Mumbai originally and is keen to re-create the Indian tiffin phenomenon in Melbourne.
He says: ''We try to keep that tradition as much as we can and that is why our curries are not the restaurant type curries which are rich as we have customers who order the tiffins every single day.
''We try to minimise the cream and the ghee. We don't want people to be dozing off at work after they have our tiffin.''
Customers are encouraged to buy their tiffin container, which has an insulated metal interior and tempered plastic coating.
They can give the container back to Tiffins Melbourne each day to be washed and reused.
''We are an environmentally friendly business as we use the bicycles and we use recyclable containers which we wash here. They are not plastic which can be thrown away,'' Mr Pednekar says. ''Though this is a food business there is a minimum wastage as we get all the orders in advance so we don't waste the food.''
The appropriately named Jayson Currie is already a regular customer of Tiffins Melbourne.
As manager of My Mac in Melbourne, Mr Currie appreciates the environmental credentials of the tiffins but is mainly attracted by their convenience.
''My days are generally quite hectic. On the days I don't bring lunch from home, many times I don't eat until the late afternoon because I don't have time to leave my desk to purchase lunch,'' he says. ''Having it delivered to me forces me to take a break.''