The founders of startups are seers before they are CEOs. While the rest of us are hoofing it in the present, they are visualising the future. So, while the 300-sqft, co-working kitchen of FoodCoWorks in Vikhroli doesn't look like much to me, the three co-founders, Preet Kamble, Sumit Gupta and Swapnil Dhotre, can see 100 kitchens, spread across Mumbai, at least 3,000 sqft each. This kitchen is the prototype, the initial shape of things to come.

Kamble, Gupta and Dhotre met at food delivery startup, TinyOwl. Kamble was a home chef, delivering out of TinyOwl; Gupta was in corporate sales; and Dhotre was a culinary manager. With 24 years in the culinary world, Kamble had already run a couple of restaurants in Los Angeles, and set up a bakery business with his wife in Mumbai upon their return in 2014; Gupta and Dhotre, too, were ready to make the jump from employees to employers. Last year, the trio sat together to combine their insider knowledge of the F&B industry for the next step. "We were speaking to home chefs and restaurants about their problems and the problems that we, as industry professionals, were facing," says Dhotre. "This is how the idea of FoodCoWorks germinated."