Name: Dabbawalas: How India's 130-year-old food delivery system works
Uploaded: 2025-04-23T09:42:33.000Z
Duration: 3 min 17 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In the age of food delivery apps like Uber Eats, Skip the Dishes and DoorDash, it's hard to imagine this type of convenience without the technology.

But there is one food delivery service which sends out more than 200,000 meals a day and has been doing so for the past 130 years.

They are the Mumbai Dabawalas, also known as Dabawalas.

In about four hours, they deliver home-cooked meals to people at work every day.

Mumbai Dabawalas employs about 5,000 people.

Many of them have had little to no education and have never learned to read.

So how do they keep these orders in order?

The Dabawalas get on their bicycles around 9 a.m. and pick up homemade lunches from their assigned neighborhoods, which are generally the same every day, using what's called dabas or Indian lunch boxes.

After picking up the lunch boxes, usually made by the partners, parents or house staff of the intended recipient, they have until 10.30 a.m. to bike to the nearest train station.

Over the next hour, they load all of the lunch boxes on the train.

This is where keeping track of everything gets really tough.

A vital part of their delivery service is the coding system.

So the lids are labeled with letters, numbers and symbols indicating where these lunch boxes have to be delivered to, who's delivering them and the homes where they came from.

Between 11.30 and 12, the Dabawalas offload from the train and continue sorting.

Between noon and 1, they deliver lunches to their clients.

During this hour, over 200,000 deliveries are made across Mumbai.

They all kind of have to work together in harmony in order to allow the Dabawalas to perform at their level of performance.

The Mumbai Dabawalas are known for being punctual with their deliveries.

Their mission statement since they first started running in 1890 has been to always deliver on time.

The Dabawalas don't just deliver lunches to people at work.

They also pick up lunch boxes from the individuals after they're done and deliver them back to their homes the same day.

All this efficiency has the business community intrigued, including Harvard Business School, which has done a case study.

The simplicity of how they do things actually helps them so they don't have to deal with a lot of complexity that we typically find.

So sometimes keeping things quite simple and be laser-focused on what it is that you're trying to achieve is really important.

Tomke spent a day with the Dabawalas in Mumbai for his research and thinks companies around the world can learn from the Mumbai Dabawalas.

In an age where we are so focused on modern technology, sometimes the best plan is the simplest.

Many of them have had little to no education and can't read.

It doesn't matter what I'm saying, right?

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Dabbawalas: How India's 130-year-old food delivery system works

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