Tiffin Services grow during the Pandemic

People running tiffin services are helping Covid patients by providing nutritious food. 

Jaipur: Tiffin services have seen a boom during this time,  as COVID-19 patients are home quarantined and are not able to cook for themselves. 

Arpit Garg from Amrit Dham tiffin services delivers tiffins to Covid-19 patients isolated at home. ,   He said, “People who either live alone or families that might have  COVID-19,  they avail our tiffin services. We avoid putting spices in the food to cater to their health needs. We did this last year as well.”Amrit Dham has seen a 40 percent increase in business. “We mostly cater only to  COVID-19 patients now. So the menu is the same for all,” said Shivi Garg from Amrit Dham.   “We are following all precautions of sanitization and social distancing while delivering food at the patients’ doorstep. We are also taking only digital payments to avoid any physical contact. We are happy to be able to help the patients at this time,” added Shivi. 

Aanchal runs a home-cooked tiffin service to cater to COVID-19 patients.   She said, “We are home cooks and thus we are not taking too many orders. The food gets delivered via Swiggy.” 

She continued, “Since some of our family members had got COVID-19, we realized that getting nutritious food during this time becomes difficult as most of the members are down with the virus. We wanted to bridge this gap and thus started our services. We ensure that the food we deliver is fit for the patients and that they get all the nutrients they need.”

Melvin Castelino who recently had Covid said, “The tiffin services have been very helpful. During the pandemic, domestic cooking gets out of gear especially when the whole family is down with Covid. Such services are a need of the hour. The meals were wholesome and nutritious. Even if one can cook, there is no energy left when one has Covid.” 

The COVID-19 cases in India are surging at a rapid speed. Amidst this chaos, a few people have designed a platform to help Covid patients. Jaipur Beat is a portal containing a list of resources that a Covid patient might need. It also includes tiffin services.  Anisha, the Co-founder, said, “A lot of people have come up with tiffin services to help the COVID-19 patients. The patients have found the tiffin services very helpful. 

However, some tiffin services are struggling to survive as their employees have returned to their native places. An employee from My Lunchbox tiffin service said, “Our services have been shut for now due to the increase in the COVID-19 cases. In the fear of getting the virus due to a surge in cases and decrease in staff members, we decided to temporarily shut it.” 

“We are providing food for the patients in need. We increased our meals from 300 to 1000. We provide meals to the home quarantined patients too,” said Surengra, a member of Kamla Bai Charitable Trust (KBCT) NGO.  

Anju Kotara, a Nutritionist said, “ Every Covid-19 patient has a different set of requirements when it comes to food. It depends on the complexity of the disease. In general if we see, if a patient has a good diet then they should have more protein intake. They should have paneer, dal and pulses. It helps with the patients’ recovery. Extremely critical patients can feed on liquid diet. They should be given wheatgrass juice and mushroom juice.”