A new restaurant's menu goes live in 90 minutes, so it starts earning sooner.

More than half of India's food orders run on this platform. Every new menu there is built or kept accurate by DesiCrew, and has been since 2013. A single menu can carry 10,000 separate data points, and one wrong entry fails all of it. The platform's automation drafts the simple menus — DesiCrew's people decide what goes live. So a restaurant earns days sooner, and a diner can trust that what they ordered is what arrives.

01 — The Mandate

It is India's largest food platform. Every menu on it, and every change to one, must meet a single standard before it can go live. DesiCrew runs that operation.

Scale. Around 10,000 menus are processed every day, roughly 150,000 a month. Coverage. Every new restaurant that joins the platform comes through DesiCrew. Three lines of work. Building new and rebuilt menus, moderating the changes merchants request, and quality-checking the output of the platform's automation. Always on. 24 hours a day, every day of the year, through festival surges and the spike of a World Cup final.

02 — The Challenge

The scanning is the easy part. The judgment is the hard part, and the stakes are high. Mark a non-vegetarian dish as vegetarian, and in a country where diet is often bound to faith, a diner's trust breaks in an instant. One wrong data point can fail an entire menu. That is the standard DesiCrew works to, and it is why the work resists automation.

A single dish is not a single entry. A thali carries a price, a vegetarian or non-vegetarian flag, a GST class, the rice type, the dal type, the number of chapatis, the bracket style the rule demands, an availability note, and the language the description is written in. The arithmetic of accuracy. Around 100 data points per dish, around 90 dishes per menu — close to 10,000 points in a single menu, held to a 99% accuracy standard. The rules are situational. A roughly 100-page rulebook where "idli" is correct and "idly" is not, and where a language rule can flip depending on how many items sit on the menu. The inputs are chaotic. Handwritten cards, blurry scans, fine-dining layouts and roadside boards, no two formats alike.

Anatomy of one dish — why a menu resists automation

Automation reads the card. It cannot make the call. Whether a dish is vegetarian when its name does not say so, or which rule applies once the item count crosses a threshold — these are decisions, not transcriptions. A person makes the final call on every point that carries one, and nothing reaches a diner until they do.

03 — The Approach

DesiCrew automates what it can, applies judgment where it must, and builds its own tools to do both.

Custom document processing. DesiCrew built a tool that brought turnaround down to 90 minutes, with one hour in sight. Judgment on every line. Every automated output is checked before it goes live; the complex menus are processed by hand against the full rulebook. The rulebook, on demand. A chatbot DesiCrew built answers any of the 100 pages of rules instantly, so accuracy never depends on memory alone. Vision Board. A live dashboard DesiCrew built to track accuracy against target for every line of work — the platform has adopted it for internal use. Trust, demonstrated. The client grants DesiCrew the authority to push changes live — the same authority it withholds from its own merchants.

04 — The Outcome

Faster to revenue. Menus go live in 90 minutes, down from four days at the start — so restaurants start earning days sooner, and the platform adds sellable supply faster.

Errors caught before they cost anything. More than half of all fresh menus are checked item by item, every day, catching hundreds of thousands of potential errors before any reach a customer — so a diner trusts what they order. Accuracy held at scale. The 99% standard is maintained across as many as 10,000 points per menu, at 150,000 menus a month — so the catalog keeps growing without the quality slipping.

05 — Why the relationship holds

DesiCrew began this work in 2013 with a team of ten, when the platform itself was young. The team is around 300 today. DesiCrew also supported the platform through the GST rollout, implementing regulatory requirements with minimal business disruption.

Turnover is low — people stay three to four years, so the institutional memory of a 100-page rulebook stays in the building. That tenure is the quiet engine of accuracy. The client's side of the relationship has changed hands roughly every six months; the work has been re-evaluated by around 20 stakeholders and kept every time. It has never been pulled back.

About DesiCrew

DesiCrew is an applied-intelligence company — the human and technology layer that makes AI systems and enterprise operations work reliably and grow at scale, refined in production since 2007. IIT Madras incubated · Everest Group PEAK Matrix 2024 · Great Place to Work.