Behind the Plate - Swiggy Originals Series

Swiggy should do a series called “Behind the Plate” where they showcase the actual people who make your food. Not those polished chef interviews you used to see on TV, but something raw and authentic. There’s this huge emotional connection with food that most apps completely miss out on.

The idea is simple. Each episode features one chef from a restaurant you order from. Make the chef the hero of the story.

Think of this less like Chef’s Table or Nikhil Kamath inviting restaurant owners to discuss French patisserie techniques. The goal, the audience, and the format are different here. Chef’s Table tells the story of restaurant owners perfecting their craft—not the young cook from UP who moved to Bengaluru with big dreams and now supports his family back home by making chole kulche. This will focus on the latter.

No script, just real conversations about their journey, struggles, and what drives them to cook.  Show them actually making their signature dishes. Let viewers see the care that goes into the food they order with a few taps on their phone.

I remember eating at this small restaurant in Ubud. It was run by this one old lady with her daughter. The menu had this story about how they started. How they care about the ingredients and how they source them. Made me appreciate the food even more knowing the story behind it.

There are three things this kind of content could do for Swiggy:

  • First, it builds trust. When you see the actual people making your food, their dedication to hygiene and quality, you’re more likely to order (hypothesis). Food delivery has this trust barrier that’s hard to overcome. With adulteration cases going up, people have started thinking more and more about what they put inside their body. This will also show the kitchen, and implicitly signal how hygienic the place is.
  • Second, it creates an emotional connection. We all love stories. When you know the chef spent 10 years perfecting that biryani recipe that they learned it from their grandmother, you’re more invested in trying it.
  • Third, it differentiates Swiggy from every other food delivery app. Zomato, Swiggy, they’re all starting to look the same. Features get copied within weeks. In a space where technology is quickly commoditised, the stories you tell could be a differentiator. This kind of content library? That’s harder to replicate. Keep it simple, authentic, conversation based. The rough edges make it feel more real. These will be Instagram reels and Youtube Shorts. Restaurants will be happy to support this as Swiggy will be putting in the effort to market them.  Vibe of the shorts will be a mix of fave.finds.blr’s Koshy restaurant reel + Ranveer Brar’s Kolkata street food reels.

Once you have enough content, you can even showcase this in the restaurant page. Will this directly increase orders? Maybe not immediately. But it changes how people think about Swiggy. It’s no longer just an app, but a connection to real people making real food. Every order becomes a story, not just a transaction. I don’t know if Swiggy is thinking about content as a moat, but they should be. (Another similiar idea I posted was live streaming the inside of a kitchen to build trust. This was during peak covid. That never took off. Maybe this one will.)

Added context:

People on Twitter were commenting saying this is Chef’s Table in replies. Another series by Zomato. Nikhil Kamath has done episodes with other restaurant owners too.

But this is not that.

This is not about the owner of a restaurant chain who is telling you how he got a loan to open his first restaurant. This is about the small-town guy from a tier 4 city who moved to Bengaluru with dreams, has a family to support back home, and is now making chole kulche for you at a restaurant with a colorful name like “Ustad ji ras bana rahe hai aur kofta khila rahe hai.” He tells how he adjusted the chole kulche recipe to make it feel like home.

Even better would be a north Indian cook making dosa at some darshini.

It is reels. 1-minute videos. Bingeable content.

Chef’s Table is about how a Michelin star restaurant owner grew his own potatoes. You can’t show this level of detail in a YouTube short or reel. You need an hour. It is niche and not for the mainstream audience.

This is for the masses. People tagging others and saying, “Oh I know this small town where this cook came from. It is close to where I grew up.” It is about nostalgia. It is about connecting with others.

Showing the restaurant kitchen is of course an important but subtle part to signal hygiene. But the storytelling has to be stellar.

The vibe is important. See Ranveer Brar’s Deckers Lane reel. There is this other Pakistani Instagrammer I had seen. She would go around Karachi eating at small street food places. This is mostly like that, but also focuses on the cook.