Busy Shanghai citizens who have no time to cook can now use an app through their mobile phones to hire a professional chef to come visit their homes and use their own kitchen to cook. With the holidays approaching, these apps became popular among Chinese people who prefer gourmet dishes done by a real chef.
One of these apps is Good Chef, developed and managed by Shanghai Lekuai Information Technology Co. Ltd. With this app, a user just needs to leave cooking assignments and a phone number and a chef will call back to discuss the details. With this, the chef takes notes of the menu, ingredients to avoid, the state of the user's kitchen where the chef is bound to cook, and whether the user has available ingredients in his own home.
The uniformed chef arrives the next day with his special chef ingredients and cook the meals as per the client's specifications. After the meal preparation, the chef cleans up the kitchen and takes the garbage out as he or she leaves.
As China embraces the smartphone lifestyle, more people are turning to mobile apps to make their lives easier. Chinese people turn to the app The Paper for news, Taobao for online shopping and Baidu Map for directions. Good Chef is another app in addition to hundreds already available for mobile users.
The fact that these apps are new raises concerns. Among them is the lack of industry supervision and standards.
Although the government requires food businesses to have health certificates, work licenses and proof of technical proficiency, the clients have no way to be sure that the chef cooking in their kitchen is a professional since the certificates and licenses apply to the business establishments offering the services and not on the individual chef practitioners.
Another major concern is that the clients are not sure where the ingredients that the chef brings into their own kitchens came from. Even if receipts will be produced, the clients do not know if the food were really bought at regular markets with health standards approved by the appropriate authorities. Not even a healthy dose of scrutiny can prevent unhealthy food from finding its way to the clients' tables.