Startup delivers food to your train seat

An Indian logistics company will deliver food directly to your train seat while you are en route.

Today, almost anything can be delivered door to door. Recent innovative delivery solutions have included autonomous delivery robots and diesel fuel delivered directly to your car. However, delivery usually requires a static location or address, so the company making the drop-off knows exactly where to go. Now, a last-mile delivery company in India has started a food delivery service that will bring food directly to train passengers’ seats. Trapigo is a last mile B2B logistics service provider. They have teamed up with the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) to offer pickup and delivery options for food and other amenities to people on the go.

To use the service, passengers first order food online. Trapigo’s delivery agent then picks up the food from local restaurants and delivers it directly to the customer’s train seat – even if the passenger is just stopping off in a station for a few minutes while en route. The partnership is being trialled in Nagpur. However, it will soon be expanding to other cities along the North-Central routes, including New Delhi, Itarsi, Bhopal and Jhansi. Trapigo eventually plans to serve all of India’s Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities (those with the largest populations).

Around 23 million people travel on India’s vast train network every day. Many of these people are travelling through more than one city. To serve these customers, Trapigo has developed an algorithm that can track orders and determine exactly when food needs to be picked up in order to reach passengers on time. Food can be ordered via IRCTC’s e-catering website or through a smartphone app called ‘Food on Track’. Users pay a fee of Rs 15 per order and will be able to track orders in real time. In the future, will customers be able to receive almost anything while on the go?