In the last five years, the food delivery industry
in the United States has almost quadrupled, as Americans all collectively came together
and agreed that Chipotle should cost three times more money. Meanwhile, fees have gotten
worse, small restaurants are being extorted, delivery drivers are getting their tips stolen,
and there’s still, like, a 30% chance that if you order a burger from Shake Shack it’s going to
take 75 minutes and when it shows up it’s going to be someone else’s half-melted pint of ice cream.
This is as good as it gets… that is, unless you live in Mumbai. For the last 130 years, Mumbai,
India has operated one of the most efficient and reliable food delivery systems in the world,
delivering 300,000 lunches per day, with precision timing and an error rate of only 0.0001%. All of
this is done entirely offline, with a fleet of 5,000 predominantly illiterate delivery workers
who organize their supply chain themselves. Oh, and did I mention that it only costs, like, 6
dollars a month, and still turns a profit while every major food delivery app somehow manages to
lose all of the money that they gouged by charging you 37 dollars for pad thai? Let’s talk about it.
The year was 1890, and Mumbai was rapidly industrializing. As the Great Indian Peninsular
Railway extended out across the country, rural Indians and British colonizers alike poured into
town. The new spectrum of different cultures also came with different tastes, and when lunchtime
rolled around, the local restaurants couldn’t quite support the diverse… um… look, basically
what I’m trying to say is that British people are too racist to eat food that tastes good
and there weren’t any restaurants that served wet bread or whatever it is that British people
eat. So, a fellow by the name of Mahadeo Havaji Bachche decided to start a delivery service that
would pick up home-cooked meals from people’s houses in the morning, and deliver them to their
offices at lunchtime—that way, everyone could eat a lunch from their own… culture. The delivery
men were called “dabbawalas”—“dabba” being the standardized cylindrical lunch container that
they used to transport meals, and “wala” being… “guy,” I guess. For a small monthly payment, these
dabbawalas would pick up your lunch each workday, and deliver it, on the hour, to wherever you
worked. And the system worked so well that it has remained, mostly unchanged—though far,
far larger—for the last century. The question remains, then: how does it actually work?
Well, the dabbawalas do not operate like traditional delivery drivers—from your kitchen to
your office, your lunch will be handed off to at least 3, but up to 12 different people, and take
multiple different forms of transportation on its way to you. All of this is coordinated not by
a computer or a map, but by a collection of 4 to 5 colored symbols painted on top of each dabba,
which contain the information not only of where to deliver it, but also the route the container needs
to take and who’s responsible for each step of the journey. It all starts here, with a symbol that
denotes one of Mumbai’s 150 train stations. The entire dabbawala delivery system is built around
the Mumbai Suburban Railway—one of the busiest and most extensive commuter railways in the world.
Each station serves as an initial collection hub for the surrounding households, which themselves
are grouped into smaller areas that are each overseen by a single dabbawala, labeled from A to
Z; so, for example, VLP would mean the container should start its journey at “Vile Parle” station,
and “E” would indicate that it should be collected by the dabbawalla assigned to that station’s
“E” zone, which, in this case, are the houses along Hanuman street. Every morning, from 8:30
to 9:30, the dabbawalas collect lunches from the households in their zone—usually between 25 and 35
stops—which each need to go off without a hitch in order to keep the process moving. If a customer’s
lunch is too heavy, they’ll get a fine. If they don’t have it ready to be picked up in time, the
dabbawala can drop them as a customer altogether. It’s sort of similar to my proposal for DoorDash,
which is that if you make your driver wait for more than 5 minutes, the driver should be
allowed to come inside your house and kill you. From 9:30 to 10:30, the dabbawalas take their
25-35 lunches, by foot or by bicycle, to a collection center outside the station. Here, the
containers are sorted by the middle symbol—this one here—which indicates the destination station.
Once sorted by destination, each collection of containers are handed off to a second group of
dabbawalas, who are given just 40 seconds to load the lunches onto the goods compartment at
the front of the correct train. If any of the containers need to transfer trains to reach their
final station, the dabbawalas will have already identified a secondary transfer hub along the
route—like Mumbai Central—where the containers can be handed off to a third group of dabbawalas and
loaded onto their next train in under 20 seconds. By around 11 or 11:30, the containers will
have reached their final station. Here, they’re sorted once again by the final part of
their code—these symbols here. Much like the zones at each origin station, each destination
station is also broken up into smaller zones, managed by one designated dabbawala—Churchgate
station, for example, has 10 zones, with the 9 on this container indicating Nariman point. So, the
dabbawalla responsible for that zone will take all of their containers—again, by bike or by foot—to
the buildings indicated in this part of the code, and then finally to the floor marked by the code’s
final digit. Every single lunch—all 300,000 of them—have to be delivered precisely within the
window of 12:30 to 1pm; any slip up in any part of this process, and this window is missed, the
worker goes hungry, their work efficacy plummets, India’s GDP starts tanking, and China becomes
the new United States. So, pressure’s on, every single morning. And then—just as
efficiently as they were delivered—each container needs to be collected a half hour later
and this whole process has to happen in reverse, returning the containers to every single household
so that they can be reused again the next day. So… why don’t you have it this good?
Well, part of the problem is that you, dear viewer, are a special snowflake
living in an indulgent western society, and you don’t actually want to schedule your lunch
delivery a month ahead of time—no, you want to eat red velvet-flavored rice pudding at 3:14 am,
which is a desire that cannot truly be factored into any kind of rational, standardized supply
chain. But that’s not the whole story—obviously, the repetitive, pre-organized structure of
this system leads to gains in efficiency and consistency—but it still wouldn’t function this
well without the unique way that it’s managed. You see, the dabbawalas are not a single corporate
entity—they’re broken up into about 200 different self-governing groups, each with their own
coding system, culture, and routes. These groups negotiate among themselves to add new members,
to elect dabbawalas to positions of power, and most importantly, to sign new customers. If
you pay to get your lunch delivered through the dabbawala system, it’s going to be picked up by
the same person every single day, and delivered by the same person every single day. These are
the same people that can negotiate your rates, determine your lunch’s route, and drop you as a
customer if they feel like it—so there’s a mutual sense of responsibility, and even community, for
everyone involved. People trust their dabbawalas, and in turn, the dabbawalas know exactly
who they’re serving and how to serve them; in 1993, amidst repeated domestic bombings of
the Mumbai Suburban Railway, the only riders who weren’t frisked were the dabbawalas—their
local communities knew who they were, and the dabbawalas knew if they were carrying a container
that had been tampered with. Imagine trusting your DoorDash driver with your life. I don’t even
trust my DoorDash driver to not spit in my food; I just accept that it’s already been spat
in. So maybe, the problem we have is a lack of community and sense of trust in one another.
Or maybe it’s capitalism. Or maybe those are the same thing. I don’t know. Maybe try giving your
DoorDash driver an unsolicited hug next time: you never know what might happen.
I, however, do know what will happen, because I’ve already taken a course on probability
theory from our sponsor, Brilliant.org, and guess what: you’re going to jail. Brilliant.org is my
go to resource whenever I need to learn a new STEM skill quickly and efficiently—they have courses
on everything from neural networks to Python to circuitry… they even just put out a course on
going viral on Twitter, not that I need it. Their lessons are interactive, fun, and make even
the most technical concepts easy to grasp. And even better: they’re quick. No sitting down and
studying long blocks of text—with Brilliant.org, you can learn these new concepts a few minutes at
a time; knock out a lesson on the subway, do one in bed, cruise through a few in the shower, it’s
up to you. So whether you’re in school and trying not to forget too much over the summer, or a real
adult just trying to know more stuff, I highly recommend you give Brilliant.org a try. And it’s
never been easier, because you can try everything they have to offer—free—for a full 30 days if
you visit brilliant.org/hai or click the link in the description. You’ll also get 20% off an annual
premium subscription, so what are you waiting for?