Tandoor
& Co.

Tandoor & Co. had a 22-year-old kitchen, a queue out the door every lunch, and a packaging bill climbing 18% a year as plastic single-use prices kept moving. The owners wanted to bring back the dabba — the stainless tiffin tradition the parents in the neighbourhood grew up with — without losing the convenience of modern delivery.

The brief was deceptively hard. Reusable containers fail at deposit-return economics: people pay ₹250, lose the tiffin, the kitchen replaces it, and within four months the system collapses. We needed a deposit mechanic that actually pulled containers back to the kitchen at 80%+ rates.

We mapped the entire customer journey end-to-end before touching a sketch. The friction wasn't the deposit — it was the return. People didn't know when to bring tiffins back, where to leave them, or how to get the deposit reversed. So we designed the return into the routine: every tiffin carries a date stamp, the rider collects empties on the next delivery, and the deposit credits to the customer's account the same day.

The tiffin itself is a four-tier food-grade stainless system with a screw-cap top, sourced from a Tier-2 supplier we'd vetted on three previous projects. The brand mark sits etched on the lid — survives a thousand dishwasher cycles, can't peel off, and quietly reinforces ownership for the customer who keeps it on their kitchen shelf between orders.

The wrapper around the tiffin — the secondary 'unboxing' layer — is a single sheet of FSC-certified paper printed in one colour, hand-tied with jute. It's the part customers photograph and it's the part we throw away. The tiffin underneath is the part that stays.

Three months in, the return rate is sitting at 84% — comfortably above the 80% break-even line — and customer surveys are flagging the tiffin programme as a top reason for choosing Tandoor over the cloud-kitchen incumbents.

On the unit-economics side, the kitchen is now spending 31% less per order on packaging than it was at the start of the year, with no change to perceived quality or service speed.