Tiffin Subscription Playbook

This playbook is for anyone running a tiffin service, or about to start one, who wants a tiffin service business plan that works at 20 meals a day and still works at 200. It is written for the owner who cooks, the couple who split kitchen and delivery, and the small team that has outgrown a notebook and a UPI QR code.

By the end you will have seven things written down: the plan structure you sell and its prices, a daily menu and cut-off routine, a skip, pause and refund policy you can send to every subscriber, a payment collection schedule that runs before you cook, a delivery route built by area, a corporate pitch and contract, and a 90-day plan to put all of it in place.

The belief it will change is this. A tiffin service looks like a cooking business. It behaves like a subscription business, and the subscription rules (cut-offs, prepaid plans, credits, routes) decide whether the cooking makes money. Most services that close in the first year had good food. They had no rules.

Chapter 1: The subscription you are actually selling

A restaurant sells a meal. A tiffin service sells a promise: the same door, the same window, every working day, for a month. That promise is what customers pay for in advance, and it is also what breaks when you take a far-away customer, allow same-day skips or cook on credit. Every rule in this playbook protects the promise.

Pick one customer group first

Tiffin customers in India fall into four groups, and each needs a different menu, price and route. Working professionals want office lunch between 12:30 and 1:15, lighter food, and easy skips when they travel. Students and PG residents want large portions, low prices and dinner, and they churn at semester end. Families and elderly customers want home-style food with dietary rules, delivered to a residence, and they stay for years. Patients and caregivers near hospitals need plain food at short notice and in irregular volume.

Choose one to start; serving all four from day one produces a scattered route and a menu that pleases nobody. The complete guide to starting a tiffin service covers licences, kitchen setup and the startup budget; this playbook assumes you have those.

Meal-count plans beat calendar plans

There are two ways to define a monthly plan. A calendar plan is "all weekdays in November". A meal-count plan is "24 lunches, valid for 30 days". Sell meal-count plans. On a calendar plan every skip is a credit you now owe and every public holiday is an argument. On a meal-count plan a skipped day simply does not consume a meal, a pause extends the validity, and there is almost nothing to refund.

Meal-count plans also keep the ledger simple. Each subscriber has three numbers: meals remaining, credits carried, and paid until. Everything in chapters 4 and 5 is built on those three numbers.

The numbers a plan has to carry

Before pricing anything, look at what a full month looks like at a size most home kitchens reach within six months. This is an illustrative monthly statement for a veg lunch service with 60 subscribers on a 24-meal plan in a tier-2 city. Your costs will differ; the structure will not.

Three things to notice. Ingredients are the largest line, so a ₹5 change in per-meal cost moves the bottom line by ₹7,200 a month. The rider is the largest fixed cost, which is why route density matters as much as the recipe. And the statement assumes 60 plans paid in advance. The tiffin service business plan with profit calculations runs a similar statement at 40 and 100 meals a day.

Chapter 2: Pricing monthly plans from the loaded cost up

Tiffin pricing goes wrong in one predictable way: the owner looks at the service down the road, sees ₹100 a meal, and charges ₹90. The right order is the reverse. Cost one meal, decide the margin you need, set a per-meal anchor, then build the plans off that anchor with a discount that pays for commitment and nothing more.

Cost one meal honestly

Take a real shopping receipt and cost your standard meal: one dal, one sabzi, four rotis, rice, salad, pickle. The loaded cost has four parts.

• Ingredients: commonly ₹35 to ₹50 in tier-2 cities and ₹45 to ₹60 in metros, moving with the season.
• Gas, electricity and water: about ₹3 to ₹5 per meal for a home kitchen cooking 30 to 80 meals.
• Packaging: disposables at ₹8 to ₹15 a set; steel dabbas at ₹3 to ₹6 per meal including washing and replacement, if you can run the return loop.
• Delivery: ₹5 to ₹10 per meal on a dense self-delivered route. A ₹15,000 rider spread over 60 meals a day is about ₹10 a meal; over 25 meals a day, about ₹25.

For the worked numbers in this playbook the loaded cost is ₹70: ₹46 for ingredients and utilities, ₹6 packaging, ₹10 delivery, and ₹8 for wastage, trial meals and credits. Write your own number down before going further.

Set the anchor per-meal rate

The anchor is the price of one meal bought on its own, and every plan is a discount off it. For a home kitchen where the margin is the owner's income, 40 to 50 percent over loaded cost is a sensible floor; a kitchen paying rent and staff needs more. At ₹70 loaded cost and a 45 percent margin, the anchor is ₹70 divided by 0.55, which is about ₹127. Round to ₹130.

Check it against the market. If nearby services charge ₹100 and you need ₹130, either cut cost (steel dabbas, a tighter route, a smaller sabzi portion) or position for the customer who pays for quality. Matching ₹100 and hoping volume fixes it is how services end up busy and broke. The full method is in tiffin service pricing: how to set monthly and per-meal rates.

Build the plan ladder

Plans exist to get advance payment and a predictable count. The discount should pay for exactly that, so 10 to 15 percent off the anchor on a monthly plan is normal, and 25 percent usually means the anchor was inflated to make the plan look good. Keep the ladder short enough to explain in one WhatsApp message.

At ₹115 a meal against a ₹70 loaded cost, the monthly plan carries a margin of about 39 percent, which is what holds the chapter 1 statement together. The trial pack is deliberately full price: it filters out discount hunters and makes the monthly plan the obvious choice in the first renewal message.

Price the extras, non-veg and the second meal

Extras are where small services quietly give margin away, because "two extra rotis" sounds free. Price everything: extra roti at ₹5 to ₹8, or a large variant of the meal at ₹20 to ₹30 more; non-veg on fixed weekdays at a ₹25 to ₹40 supplement so the shopping list stays predictable; Jain, no-onion-garlic and low-oil requests at a small plan supplement if you can do them at scale, and a polite no if you cannot; dinner as a second meal slightly cheaper than lunch because the cooking run is shared, never free; delivery outside the core area at ₹10 to ₹20 a meal, or a clear "we do not deliver there".

Raising prices without losing the base

Vegetable prices move every season, so review your loaded cost every quarter. Raise at renewal, never mid-plan, with a one-line reason sent a week ahead, in ₹5 to ₹10 steps rather than one jump. Offer existing subscribers one renewal at the old price if they pay two months in advance, which turns a price rise into a cash-flow gain. Expect to lose a few price-sensitive customers each time; if you lose none, you raised too little.

Chapter 3: The daily menu broadcast routine

The daily menu message is the heartbeat of a tiffin service. It tells subscribers what is coming, reminds them of the cut-off, and gives you the count you cook against. Sent the same way every evening, it removes most of the morning chaos. Sent at random times with random wording, it creates it.

What the evening message says

Keep it under 40 words and send it at the same time every day, 30 to 45 minutes before the cut-off. One structure that works:

Tomorrow (Tuesday): rajma, aloo gobi, jeera rice, 4 rotis, salad. Non-veg plan: egg curry. Skipping? Reply SKIP by 8 pm tonight. Meals remaining on your plan: 17.

Three things are doing the work. The menu is specific, because "veg thali" earns no anticipation and "rajma chawal" does. The cut-off is stated every time, which is what makes it enforceable. The running count is personal, which keeps disputes near zero. Once a week, attach a photo of the actual dabba shot in daylight; it does more than any designed graphic.

Do not send the menu at 10 pm; a late message gets skip replies at 11 pm, which you either honour and lose money on or refuse and lose goodwill on.

The cut-off and the morning count

Set the cut-off to match when you actually commit money. If you buy vegetables at 6 am, then 8 pm the evening before is right for lunch, and 11 am the same day for dinner. At the cut-off the count is final. Skips after it are consumed meals; new orders after it are for the day after. This one rule, applied without exceptions, is worth more than any software.

Fifteen minutes after the cut-off, pull the count: meals by type, credits being used, pauses starting or ending, new subscribers, and one-day address changes. From that come the shopping list and the packing sheet. If pulling the count takes more than ten minutes, your ledger is in the wrong place.

The daily timeline

This is a lunch-service day for a 60-meal kitchen with one rider. Shift the times for dinner.

The weekly rhythm

• Sunday evening: the week's menu in one message, so customers can plan skips early and you can plan shopping.
• Tuesday: list of plans ending this week; renewal links go out to each.
• Friday: the special (biryani, chole bhature, a sweet), the day people talk about you at the office, and the day for a one-tap rating request; daily rating asks become noise.
• Saturday: review the week: meals cooked against meals delivered, deliveries outside the slot, failed stops, skips after cut-off.
• First of the month: ledger refresh, credits carried forward, and the quarterly cost review if it is due.

A four-week rotation with the structure fixed and the dishes changing by weekday keeps the shopping list stable and the menu fresh. Ready-made rotations are in tiffin service menu ideas: 4-week rotation templates.

Sending it without becoming spam

On the free WhatsApp Business app, broadcast lists reach only customers who saved your number and cap at 256 contacts, which is fine under 50 subscribers. Beyond that, a tool on the WhatsApp Business API sends the daily message to everyone from your own number with each subscriber's count filled in. On the API, a message you start is a template that Meta approves once; a daily menu written as plain information with no offer language passes easily and stays approved.

On Tezzu, menu scheduling by weekday shows Tuesday's dishes on Tuesday in the store page and the ordering bot, and lunch items switch off after the cut-off, which quietly enforces the rule. Rotating menus let you set the four-week cycle once; see rotating menus for tiffin services. The evening message goes out as a WhatsApp campaign from a prepaid wallet, and the flow a subscriber sees is in how to take tiffin orders on WhatsApp.

Chapter 4: Skip days, pauses and refunds

Almost every tiffin dispute is a policy gap. Decide the skip, pause and refund rules once, send them to every subscriber at sign-up, and apply them the same way every time. Consistency is what makes a subscription feel reliable rather than like a favour.

The cut-off rule

Skip tomorrow's lunch by 8 pm today; skip today's dinner by 11 am. A skip before the cut-off is credited. A skip after it is a delivered meal, because the food is bought and cooked against the count. Say it in those words at sign-up and in every evening menu, and never make an exception in public; the one you make for a nice customer becomes the policy everyone else expects.

Skip allowance and credits

Unlimited skips turn a monthly plan into pay-per-meal with more admin. Allow four skips per 24-meal plan, each carried forward as a meal credit that expires 30 days after the plan ends. Credits are meals, never cash. Here is an illustrative example of how the numbers move.

A subscriber on the ₹2,760 plan (24 lunches at ₹115) skips three days before the cut-off and one day after. You owe three meal credits worth ₹345 at the plan rate; the late skip is consumed. Their next plan is still ₹2,760 for 24 meals, and they receive 27. No cash moves, your margin on both plans is intact, and the customer feels fairly treated because the running count in every evening message showed the credits building up.

Pauses

Customers pause for travel, exams and illness, and the goal is to keep them subscribed. Make pausing easy and bounded: minimum three days, maximum 15 per plan, one day's notice. Paused days extend the plan's validity by the same number; nothing is refunded and nothing is lost. Confirm every pause with three dates in one message: start, end, new plan end date. Longer absences are better handled as a plan end with unused meals refunded at the plan rate, so you are not carrying a liability for months.

Refunds: credit by default, cash on request

Sort refund decisions by whose side the problem is on, and the answers become automatic.

Two habits protect both the margin and the relationship. Refund as credit by default and cash on request; most people accept a credit that arrives within the hour. And when the fault is yours, do not make them ask twice: a ₹115 credit sent fast keeps a ₹2,760 monthly customer. Refund unused meals at the ₹115 plan rate, never at the ₹130 anchor, and say so in the policy. More wording for each case is in skip days, pauses and refunds: running a tiffin subscription cleanly.

The policy messages every subscriber gets

• At sign-up: "Your 24-lunch plan starts on 3 Nov. Skip any lunch by 8 pm the day before and it is credited to your next plan, up to 4 skips. Pause for 3 to 15 days with a day's notice. Skips after 8 pm cannot be credited because the food is already cooked."
• Skip confirmed: "Noted, no lunch on Thursday 6 Nov. Credits: 1. Meals remaining: 19."
• Skip after cut-off: "We have already cooked today's lunch, so we cannot credit it. Send skips by 8 pm the day before and we will always honour them."
• Pause confirmed: "Paused 10 to 16 Nov (7 days). New plan end: 9 Dec. Reply RESUME if you are back earlier."
• Plan ending: "3 lunches left. Renew now and your 2 credits are added automatically: [link]."

Keep one ledger, let one or two people edit it, and read the morning count from it rather than from memory. A spreadsheet with a row per subscriber works to about 30 customers. Beyond that, the order record should be the ledger, with each day's delivery an order, so nobody reconstructs the count from chat scrollback. On Tezzu, credits are coupons that auto-apply on the next plan purchase.

Chapter 5: Payment collection and reminders

Tiffin dues pile up for one reason: you cook first and collect later. The fix is structural: prepaid plans, a payment link that confirms itself, a reminder schedule that starts before the money is due, and delivery that stops when the plan ends.

Collect before you cook

Every plan is paid before the first meal. The trial pack exists so nobody is asked to trust you with ₹2,760 on day one. Put the payment inside the ordering flow, so the customer picks the plan, pays by UPI or card in the same conversation, and the plan activates on payment. Keep cash on delivery for single meals and trial packs only; cash on delivery for tiffin services covers how to offer it without month-end chasing.

Converting existing customers from credit

If your current base pays at month-end, convert them over one cycle. Announce that from next month all plans are prepaid, offer 5 percent off the first prepaid month, allow half-month plans of 12 meals for anyone who finds a full month difficult, and prorate honestly for someone joining on the 12th. Most customers switch without complaint once they see others doing it; the few who refuse were usually the slowest payers.

The reminder schedule

Reminders work when they are predictable, polite and early. Send the same sequence to everyone so nobody feels singled out, from the number that takes orders so they can pay in the same chat.

• 5 days before the plan ends: "Your 24-lunch plan ends on 28 Nov. Renew for December here: [link]. Your 2 credits will be added automatically."
• Last day: "Today is the last lunch on your plan. Renew by 8 pm to keep tomorrow's delivery: [link]."
• Day after, if unpaid: "Your plan has ended, so we have paused your tiffin from today. Renew any time and we restart the next working day: [link]."
• 7 days after, if still unpaid: "We have kept your slot for a week. Here is the link if you would like to continue. If not, thank you for being with us, and we would value one line of feedback."

The line that matters is the pause. If you keep delivering after the plan ends, every later message is you asking for money already spent. If delivery stops on the day the plan ends, the reminder is an invitation to restart, which is a far easier message to send and to receive. Put that rule in the sign-up message, and never send a reminder in a group.

Methods, and what each costs you in checking

A UPI QR with a screenshot is where most services start and where most arguments come from: opening the bank app, matching the amount, sixty times a month, plus the occasional edited screenshot. A payment link through a gateway confirms automatically to both sides and leaves a record, for a small fee. Cash to the rider needs daily reconciliation and leaks. Bank transfer suits office contracts and little else. The full comparison is in tiffin service payment collection: stop chasing monthly dues.

On Tezzu, plans are listed as items or bundles on your store page and in the WhatsApp bot. The customer pays at checkout by UPI or card through Razorpay, the order lands in the dashboard marked paid, and a confirmation goes to the customer on WhatsApp. You can connect your own Razorpay account for zero platform fee on payments, and renewal reminders go out as campaigns from the prepaid wallet with the store link inside.

Partial payments and late payers

Someone will ask to pay half now and half on the 15th. Allow it once, then sell them a half-month plan, so the structure carries the cash-flow problem instead of your memory. Someone will pay ₹2,500 on a ₹2,760 plan; confirm receipt and add the ₹260 to the next renewal link. Chronic late payers are usually disorganised rather than dishonest. Move them to weekly plans, where a ₹750 link every Sunday evening is easier to pay and the amount at risk is a quarter of the size.

What prepaid does to your cash

An illustrative comparison for the 60-subscriber service in chapter 1. On month-end credit, you buy a month of ingredients, about ₹66,000, and pay the rider and helper, ₹25,000, before collecting anything. If ten customers are 20 days late, ₹27,600 of your money sits in their accounts while you buy vegetables on a credit card, and two of them quietly stop ordering and never pay the last month. On prepaid plans the same month starts with ₹1,65,600 in the bank and a trial pack is the largest amount at risk. Same food, same customers, a different business.

Chapter 6: Delivery routes by area

Delivery is where a ₹115 meal makes or loses money. The cooking is finished by noon either way. What happens in the next 90 minutes, how many doors one rider reaches, how often food is late, and how much fuel and salary each dabba carries, is where the margin lives.

Density first, distance second

Define your service area as a list of buildings rather than a radius. A route is a sequence of stops, and what matters is how many meals you drop at each stop and how far apart the stops are. Twenty meals to one office tower take five minutes; twenty meals to twenty houses across a suburb take an hour.

An illustrative comparison. Sixty subscribers in three clusters, an office park with two drop points (24 meals), one apartment complex (18 meals at 14 doors) and a PG lane (18 meals at 6 doors), is a 75-minute loop for one rider. The same sixty scattered across a city need two riders, cost about ₹16,000 more a month, and still produce more late complaints. Map your customers, find the two or three densest clusters, and say no, politely, to customers outside them until a cluster forms there too.

Zones and charges

Turn the cluster map into zones. Zone 1 is the core route, with delivery included in the plan. Zone 2 is the ring you can reach with a ₹10 to ₹15 per-meal charge. Everything else is "not yet". Zones let you take the occasional far customer at a price that covers the detour, and make the "we do not deliver there" conversation automatic rather than personal. On Tezzu, delivery zones with distance-based charges apply this at checkout. How to manage tiffin deliveries: routes, timing and delivery staff goes deeper on zone design and rider handovers.

Sequence from the deadline backwards

Office lunch has a hard window, usually 12:30 to 1:15. Residential dinner is softer, 7:30 to 8:30. Build the day backwards: if the last office stop must be done by 1:15 and the loop takes 75 minutes, the rider leaves at 11:50, packing ends at 11:45, cooking ends at 11:20. Kitchens that are chronically late usually have the cooking right and the packing late.

Give each customer a slot, "between 12:30 and 1:00", never a time. Put the strictest deadlines first and the most flexible last, loop the route to end near the kitchen, and plan the sequence once a week; daily skips and address changes are edits to that list. Keep a 10-minute buffer for the day the lift is out. Insulated bags or crates keep food hot for 60 to 90 minutes; without them, the last stops get a lukewarm meal and leave a rating that says so.

Riders: hiring and paying

Up to 30 or 40 meals a day in a dense area, the owner or a family member delivers and the cost is fuel. Beyond that you need a rider, and the arrangement depends on how many hours of work you actually have.

Write the expectations down: start time, route order, how to mark a delivery, what to do when the customer does not answer, who pays for a lost dabba. Pay on the day you promised, every time. A reliable rider is worth far more than the ₹1,000 you might save by haggling.

Dabbas and the return loop

Steel dabbas cost less per meal over a year and customers like them, and they double the logistics, because every delivery is also a collection. Run two sets per subscriber so the rider swaps full for empty at each stop, keep a third set in reserve, and charge a refundable deposit of ₹200 to ₹400. Disposables at ₹8 to ₹15 a set avoid all of this and suit offices, trial customers and anyone outside the daily route. Many services run steel for home subscribers and disposables for everyone else.

The day the rider does not come

It will happen, usually on the day a new corporate account starts. Keep the route list in a form anyone can follow, including you. Have a second person who knows the loop, and keep a courier partner app set up with your kitchen address so you can book a trip for the office cluster within minutes. Tell affected customers early with a revised slot. A 20-minute delay announced at 12:15 is a minor annoyance; the same delay discovered at 1:30 is a cancelled plan.

Marking each delivery from the rider's phone, as it happens, closes the order, sends the customer a delivered message and keeps credit balances accurate. On Tezzu, the staff app gives the rider the day's orders in one list and lets them move each order to delivered, which triggers the WhatsApp update to the customer.

Chapter 7: Corporate contracts

One agreement with an office of 40 people is 40 meals to one address at one time every working day. It is the fastest way to add volume and the hardest sale you will make, because the buyer is an admin or HR manager who will be blamed if lunch is late. The best reference you can offer is a dozen of their own employees who already order from you, so this chapter assumes a reliable individual route near the office.

Which offices, and who decides

Good prospects have 20 to 200 staff, no canteen or a poor one, a location where stepping out for lunch takes 30 minutes, and management that already spends on staff perks: IT and BPO offices, co-working spaces, small manufacturing units, hospital admin wings and coaching institutes. The decision sits with admin or HR, with the founder in companies under 50 people, and with the community manager in a co-working space.

Start with offices on your existing route; thirty meals added to a building you already visit cost almost nothing in rider time, and thirty meals across town cost a second route. Your first contact should be an employee who already eats your tiffin, introducing you by WhatsApp. A warm introduction gets a trial far more often than a cold walk-in with a menu.

What they will ask for

• Your FSSAI registration or licence number, printed on the menu and the invoice. The process is in tiffin service licence and FSSAI registration.
• GST registration if you are above the threshold, or a clear statement that you are below it. Companies paying from a corporate account usually want a GST invoice.
• A monthly menu with veg and non-veg days marked and allergen notes.
• A hygiene statement: where the food is cooked, who cooks it, water source, packaging, staff medical certificates.
• A delivery commitment: the exact window and what happens if you miss it.
• Per-head pricing with the minimum headcount and how skips and holidays are handled.
• Two or three references, ideally their own employees.

Three pricing models

An illustrative account: a 30-person office on the company-paid model at ₹105 a meal for 22 working days is ₹69,300 a month on one invoice. Because the drop is one stop, delivery cost falls to about ₹3 a meal, so the loaded cost is roughly ₹63 and the contribution about ₹42 a meal, or ₹27,700 a month, from one address that takes five minutes on the route. Keep at least a 35 percent margin at the volume rate, because a corporate account will expect the occasional free meal when something goes wrong. Insist on a minimum headcount, an invoice paid in advance or within seven days, and a previous-evening cut-off for daily counts on the floating models.

The trial week

Almost every corporate contract starts with a trial, and the trial decides it. Offer a fixed trial, five lunches for a small group or one free lunch for the whole team, delivered exactly as the contract would be: same window, same packaging, same rider, same menu card with your FSSAI number. Collect feedback on day two and day five by a short WhatsApp message to each participant, so you have already fixed the thing the admin manager's colleagues would have mentioned. On the last day, send the proposal with the rate, headcount, window and start date, and ask for a decision by a specific day. Price the trial at cost or free for a group under 15. The pitch and the follow-up are in tiffin service for corporate offices: how to land B2B contracts.

Terms to put in writing

• Headcount and how it changes: a week's notice for permanent changes, the previous evening for daily counts.
• Price per head and a quarterly review tied to ingredient costs.
• Delivery window and the remedy for lateness: a discount on that day's meals, never a free month.
• Company holidays and your weekly off.
• Invoice timing and payment terms.
• Special meals (Jain, diabetic, allergy) at a supplement with 24 hours' notice.
• Spoiled meal procedure: replace the same day, investigate, credit.
• Two to four weeks' notice on either side.

Running the daily drop

A corporate account is one large stop with its own rules. Deliver to one named person at one point, meals labelled by name where employees chose their own, with a packing slip listing the count by type. Arrive inside the window every day; 15 minutes early beats five minutes late. Use disposables for corporate drops. Keep one person on your side as the account contact who confirms tomorrow's count with the office by 7 pm and sends the invoice on the first. Review the account monthly: meals served against headcount, late deliveries, complaints, and what the office is asking for that you do not yet offer. The second contract in the same building usually comes from a neighbour who noticed the daily drop.

On Tezzu, a corporate account sits beside your individual subscribers on the same number and dashboard. Employees on the subsidised or employee-paid models order through the bot or store page with a coupon that auto-applies the corporate rate; company-paid counts are placed as scheduled orders against the office address with a GST bill per order. Staff roles let your account contact see orders without seeing revenue.

Your 90-day plan

This plan takes a service from a notebook and a few credit customers to a prepaid subscription business with one clean route and a first corporate account. It assumes you are already cooking; run the acquisition steps in tiffin service marketing: how to get your first 50 subscribers alongside weeks 3 to 10.

If you want the plans, the cut-off, the payments and the rider's list in one place, Tezzu is one way to run it: a WhatsApp ordering bot on your own number, a free store page at tezzu.in/store/your-name, scheduled orders, menu scheduling by weekday, delivery zones, UPI and card payments through Razorpay or cash on delivery, campaigns from a prepaid wallet, ratings after delivery, and a staff app for the rider. Setup takes about 30 minutes, every plan starts with a 7-day free trial, and pricing is a flat monthly plan from ₹999 plus ₹10 per order with no commission. The tiffin service case study shows the same setup at 200 meals a day.

Frequently asked questions

What should a tiffin service business plan include?

Seven things: the customer group you serve, a plan ladder priced from the loaded cost of one meal, a daily menu and cut-off routine, a written skip, pause and refund policy, a prepaid collection schedule with reminders, a delivery route built around two or three dense clusters, and a corporate pitch for offices on that route. A monthly statement like the one in chapter 1, rebuilt each quarter, ties it together.

How many subscribers does a tiffin service need to be profitable?

For a one-person home kitchen on a tight route, 25 to 40 monthly subscribers usually pays a reasonable income. The illustrative statement in this playbook leaves about 35 percent for the owner at 60 subscribers with one rider and a helper. Beyond 80 meals a day you need a second cook, and at around 150 meals a commercial kitchen becomes necessary and the economics change again.

Should a tiffin service allow skip days?

Yes, with a cut-off and a limit. Skips sent before the cut-off, typically 8 pm the evening before lunch, become meal credits carried to the next plan, up to four a month. Skips after the cut-off count as delivered because the food is already cooked. Confirm every skip with the updated meals-remaining count so there is a written record on both sides and nothing to argue about later.

How do I collect tiffin payments without chasing customers?

Sell prepaid meal-count plans with the payment inside the ordering flow, so a plan activates when the UPI or card payment confirms. Send the same reminder sequence to everyone: five days before the plan ends, on the last day, and the day after with delivery paused. Because delivery stops when the plan ends, every reminder is an invitation to restart rather than a demand for money already spent.

Can I serve corporate and individual customers on the same route?

Yes, and the best corporate accounts are offices already on your individual route, because 30 meals to a building you visit anyway add almost no rider time. Treat the office as one large stop with a hard window, deliver to a named person with a packing slip, and keep its count and invoice separate from individual plans. Put office stops first in the sequence and flexible home stops last.