Aap! - Alternative Advertising Possibilities

Around noon on every business day, thousands stride briskly along the sidewalk of Mumbai’s (Bombay) business districts delivering lunches to 350,000 people daily, at a cost of about $3.80 a month in beautiful, simple multi-tiered lunch-boxes known as Tiffins.

These hard working individuals ensure that the businesspeople of Bombay can still have home-cooked meals personally delivered to their desks — without the inconvenience of carrying meals to work themselves on overcrowded trains — and at bargain prices.

The job title, tiffin-wallah, derives from British India’s Victorian heyday, when English gentlemen who ruled the roost partook of tiffin, a light lunch, and had it delivered by a wallah. That is an Urdu word used as a suffix to denote a function, duty or profession (Source Wikipedia.org.)

The tiffin-wallah business survives in an India that has the services of American fast-food outlets and American jet-borne courier companies. But for all the old-fangledness of the system, the Tiffen Wallah - most of who are illiterate form part of a complex enterprise that demands levels of organization, enterprise and ingenuity, not to mention back-breaking work, that need make little apology to the more up-to-date businesses that characterize the new India. According to a recent survey, there is only one mistake in every 16,000,000 deliveries and the system has registered a Six Sigma performance at 99.999999 rating (Source Wikipedia.org).

A network of wallahs collects the tiffin boxes from customers’ homes, or from women who cook lunches to order, then delivers the meals by bicycle, handcart or head-borne pannier to a local railway station.
There, they are sorted for different stations in central Bombay, where they are re-sorted and carried to their final destination, sometimes 45 miles from where they started. After lunch, the chain reverses, delivering the empty tiffin boxes back home.

At the heart of the enterprise are multicolored codes on the tiffin boxes, circular metal containers that are stacked and sealed. The codes tell the tiffin-wallahs which home the food comes from, which railway stations must be used, who the carriers are and the destination.

By all accounts, the system is virtually fail-safe, aside from train strikes or accidents, or the unreported sickness or death of a carrier.

As India modernizes and continues its prosperous path, so too have the Tiffen Wallahs. Today Tiffen Wallah dispatch centers receive orders via SMS and more recently are beginning to pass and serve in guerilla advertising campaigns. From branded lunch pails, to napkins for snack chips, the modern Tiffen Wallah as expanded vertical offering new services to a growing and urban middle class. From Anchor toothpaste, the Bandra Shah Foot clinic and for Moods Supreme Condoms (Dotted for Extra Pleasure. India’s Most Sensational Sex Accessory) advertisements, promotional samples and more are co-oped into the tiffin-delivery system.

Capitalizing on the food preferences of each tiffen lunch boxes (Vegetarian, Hindu, Muslim, Jain, Christian meals) - we expect this new form of advertising to offer interesting and relevant items. Still even though advertising might help expand the Tiffin Wallah’s income - we expect clients will still find great favor with its amazing reliability.