Case Study | Google Apps for Work
Cook Gourmet makes home cooking convenient with help from Google Apps Organisation Reality TV cooking shows make it seemingly easy to whip up delicious meals in a flash. However, this is not always the case for home cooks who usually face the challenge of finding the right ingredients and having suitable cooking tools for that delectable dish they want to prepare.
At a Glance What they wanted to do: • Adopt a flexible and cost-effective tool that would not require the company to manage its own server • Use a solution that would help employees collaborate with ease What they did: • Shared files through Drive • Integrated Sheets into its e-commerce platform to track orders and customer behaviour • Prepared reports through Sheets • Held video meetings with US investors via Hangouts What they achieved: • Collaborated effectively with one another • Eliminated the need to manage its own server • Grew its customer base to over 6,000 • Sold more than 4,500 recipe kits within its first eight months of operations
In India, where preparing home-cooked meals is a norm, food startup Cook Gourmet makes it convenient for home cooks to prepare gourmet dishes in the comfort of their own kitchens, without the need for specialised cooking tools and equipment. For customers, all they have to do is select a recipe from a menu that’s updated every week and place their order via the Cook Gourmet website. At present, the company has over 150 recipes available on its platform. The company then delivers a recipe kit, which contains fresh ingredients and a recipe card detailing the step by step cooking procedures. Customers will receive their recipe kit within two hours of placing their orders. Challenge When entrepreneurs Daman Kohli and Sanny Chaudhary set up Cook Gourmet in Gurgaon in January 2015, they were looking to meet their business needs in a cost-effective manner. “As a startup, we want to keep our costs at a minimum so we were looking for business tools that would be able to manage our servers for us. At the same time, we needed a solution that’s easily scalable and would allow us to add and delete users based on new hires or staff departures without any hassle,” said Daman. The nature of Cook Gourmet’s business also required its staff to work closely with one another to ensure that all orders are attended to and delivered on time. Having the right collaboration tools was key to running the business successfully. Solution Having worked with startups previously, Daman and Sanny have first-hand experience working with Google Apps. Being a collaborative tool, teams find it easier to work together and accomplish tasks efficiently. “With Google Apps, all we need is an Internet browser to be able to work effectively as a team. Right from the start, we knew Google Apps fits the bill for Cook Gourmet,” Daman explained.
“Working with Google Apps makes collaboration convenient for the Cook Gourmet team. We are able to share files with one another easily, without having to go through email attachments and numerous file versions. Having this information accessible anytime and anywhere enables us to act fast and make business decisions quickly, which is crucial for an e-commerce business.” - Daman Kohli, Co-founder of Cook Gourmet
About Google Apps
Google Apps is a cloud-based productivity suite that helps you and your team connect and get work done from anywhere on any device. Google Apps includes Gmail, Google Calendar (shared calendaring), Google Drive (online content storage and sharing), and Google Docs, Sheets & Slides (document creation and collaboration). For more information, visit www.google.co.in/apps
The Cook Gourmet team, comprising 10 full-time staff and 5 part-time consultants, has been using Google Apps since the company started operations. They use Drive as a central repository for all working documents, including recipe images that they use on the company’s website and recipe cards. Uploading images on Drive allows the various teams to have easy access and creates a smoother approval process, as there’s no need for emails with large attachments. They also rely heavily on Sheets for day-to-day operations. The company’s e-commerce platform is integrated into Google Sheets, which makes it easy for the team to track the status of all orders placed. The file is automatically updated whenever an order is placed, shipped out of the Cook Gourmet kitchen, and delivered to the customer’s home. Thanks to this integration, the Cook Gourmet team also gains visibility on its customers’ buying behaviours. The marketing team gains valuable insights such as frequency of orders, which is useful information for them to conceptualise more targeted marketing campaigns. “Using Google Sheets allows us to make sense of the data collected and formulate a winning strategy to grow Cook Gourmet. For instance, we create charts and graphs so we can visualise our business figures and better understand how our company is doing. In addition to growing the business, this information also helps us to be more strategic in our customer engagement,” shared Daman. The team also holds regular video meetings with their shareholders in the United States using Google Hangouts. This makes it easy for them to share business updates as meetings can be done on the go using any device. Results Almost a year into using Google Apps, Cook Gourmet has grown its customer base to over 6,000, delivering more than 500 recipe kits each week. With help from Google Apps, Daman and Sanny were also able to significantly grow Cook Gourmet while closely working with their team and monitoring their business’ health and performance. “Working with Google Apps makes collaboration convenient for the Cook Gourmet team. We are able to share files with one another easily, without having to go through email attachments and numerous file versions,” Daman said. “Having this information accessible anytime and anywhere enables us to act fast and make business decisions quickly, which is crucial for an e-commerce business,” he concluded. The company is currently looking at expanding its delivery locations to cover Bangalore, Mumbai and Hyderabad, and is in the process of developing a mobile app to cater to India’s growing mobile market.
© 2015 Google Inc. All rights reserved. Google and the Google logo are trademarks of Google Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.
