Cookly offers taste of Thai cooking to gourmet |travellers
IN AN AGE when "experiences" have become products, the travel and food industries have to think fast to catch up with their evolving clientele. Enter Cookly (https://www.cookly.me) the Bangkok-based start-up that serves as a booking platform for cooking classes around the world.
Why "start up" in Bangkok? The number of start-ups popping up in the city may very well earn the city the name of Asia's "Silicon Valley". Bangkok's young and innovative energy attracted international co-founders Benjamin Ozsanay and Etienne Marleau-Rancourt to pair up with a local, Kowit Charoenratchatabhan, to create Cookly.
"When you think of a super popular travel destination and a world-famous cuisine, you get Thailand," Ozsanay said. For the Cookly co-founders, Bangkok was also the perfect place to get started and test out their business model.
Cookly has built a platform focused on selling cooking classes to travellers who are hungry for a unique experience. "Cook the World" is the motto. In the growing gastro-tourism market, travellers are looking for new ways to travel. Experiences like cooking classes allow travellers to visit a local market, cook a local dish, and eat the meal that they have cooked. If this isn't an experience, we don't know what is.
Cookly's co-founders believe that they have managed to facilitate the access to cooking classes, and created an awareness for them at the same time. All you have to do is pick a location, pick a cooking class, and enjoy a culinary experience. "People are looking for online solutions for everything these days, and we found one for the modern-day traveller," Marleau-Rancourt told us.
Cooking classes that teach you how to make your own Thai curry paste in Bangkok, or roll your own sushi in Kyoto are really attracting those in the 20- and 30-plus age groups who are looking for new ways to see the world.
In 2017, Thailand ranks as one of the top countries relying on the tourism economy. Luckily, there are more than 30 million tourists visiting Thailand every year. The global culinary tourism industry is worth US$150 billion. This is why the next big move for Cookly is to go global. "We are opening our services in Europe this year, and plan to expand to South America by next year," said Charoenratchatabhan.
The start-up industry is always looking for solutions today, and even inventing a few products and platforms that we never knew we would be so dependent on. The Cookly platform has served as a medium between tourists and cooking classes, but Ozsanay says that this is just the beginning.
Benjamin Ozsanay is co-founder, CEO Cookly (https://www.cookly.me) , DTAC Accelerate batch 5.