I’ve probably mentioned this a few times but I love traveling 
and one of the main reasons I love traveling is because I get to see the amazing things that go on outside my home country.
I was introduced to the Tiffin System on my second day in Mumbai as I walked swiftly through the Churchgate station trying to keep up with my colleague. She pointed at these long carriers that had all these little boxes in them and said “Those are lunch boxes they deliver them all over Mumbai.” At the time I thought oh that’s interesting….I was still in my jet lag fog.
The other day we had another conversation about the Tiffin System so I decided to do some research. First, let’s get one thing straight, Indian people like their lunch hot (not just spicy hot, but temperature hot)….I mean who doesn’t. So the Dabbawallahs (the people who pick up and deliver the tiffins (the lunch boxes) go to every area of Mumbai (and this city is f*in huge!) about an hour before lunch (Indians generally each lunch from 1-2pm) pick up the hot meal, hop on trains and deliver the tiffins by bike to hungry Indians all over Mumbai.
Despite delivering over 160,000 tiffins each day, only 1 out of 6 million tiffins fails to arrive at the correct destination (they were awarded the six sigma quality assurance rating by Forbes). And just to be clear there are no computers, or central dispatch systems at work here. The Dabbawallahs rely on a complex coding system that uses numbers and letters to indicate the area of pick up, the beginning train station, the destination train station, the area to be delivered in, the building and the floor…..my head hurts just thinking about it.
Not only is this system itself amazing, the tiffins are actually quite cool themselves. They are circular, aluminum lunch boxes that have various compartments that screw onto each other and that way the rice, curry, and dessert can all be housed separately.
Can you say resourceful! This system surely tops any computer system or business process I’ve ever worked in Props to the Tiffin System!
