Two AI awards at the Universal AI Awards 2026, evaluated by EY

On 17 September 2026, at the India Chapter of the Universal AI Awards in New Delhi, Henchu won two awards: AI in Food & Beverage (F&B) sector and AI Startup of the Year.

Both are AI awards. Neither is for the cooking. The fifteen mothers who cook for Henchu still do it the way they always have, by hand, from recipes nobody wrote down. What the jury looked at is everything around the stove. This post explains what that is, why Henchu exists, and where you can see the awards for yourself.

On stage in New Delhi

The ceremony was held at the Hyatt Regency, New Delhi, as part of the first India Chapter of the awards. Karthik, our co-founder, went up twice to receive them for the team.

Why Henchu

The best food in India is not cooked in restaurants. It is cooked by mothers at home, from recipes that live in their hands and not on paper. Henchu is the Kannada word for the flat pan those recipes are cooked on, and it is a home kitchen in Malleshwaram, Bengaluru, where a different mother cooks each day and the dish carries her name.

Four things usually stand between one of those mothers and a livelihood, and not one of them is about whether she can cook. Her knowledge is instinct: she knows a pickle is ready by looking at it. A dish made for eight is not the same dish at two hundred. She has no website, no brand and no photographs. And even once her food is listed, reaching people means constant content that nobody has time to make after a day at the pan.

Henchu wants to be a platform for mothers. A woman with one good recipe should be able to earn from it without renting a kitchen, registering a brand or learning software. She cooks. We handle the kitchen, the packing, the delivery, the customers and the payment. Her name stays on the dish. Today fifteen mothers cook with us, and forty two of their products are on sale across ten categories.

How AI is used at Henchu

We did not put a chatbot on a website. We put AI inside the running of the business, reachable from the one tool our team uses all day, which is WhatsApp.

• Catering proposals. A plain brief goes in, for example a vegetarian corporate lunch for two hundred guests at a set price a head. A branded, priced proposal page comes back in about a minute. It used to be written by hand and reach the client the next day.
• Invoices, kitchen notes and order confirmations. The same system produces them, so the paperwork stays organised as a by-product and not a monthly scramble.
• Events. Bookings across four banquet halls and an auditorium run on the same foundation.
• Websites and marketing. AI helps us build product pages for the mothers, write for search and edit the reels we shoot on a phone, so we can publish far more often than one founder could alone.
• Recipes, next. We are working towards a mother sending a Kannada voice note and having it become a listed, priced product without ever opening a laptop.

Between 6 June and 5 August 2026 the system produced thirty catering proposals, for groups of ten to six hundred and fifty, with the same effort either way and no administrative hire. That gives back about ten hours a week, which goes into bringing more mothers in and finding better ingredients.

Why it matters: lower costs, more mothers

Every mother who joins Henchu brings dishes to price, menus to publish, orders to confirm and customers to answer. If all of that had to be done by hand, each new mother would add to our costs, and we could only take on as many as we could afford to support.

AI keeps that cost low. The less it costs us to run the business around the kitchen, the more mothers we can welcome, and the more of them can use Henchu as a platform to earn from a talent they have had all their lives. That is why we use AI at all. Nobody at Henchu has been replaced by it. It simply makes room for more mothers at the stove.

Where AI does not go

The model drafts, a person decides. Nothing written by AI reaches a customer without a human approving it. AI does not cook, does not choose recipes and never talks to a customer on its own. The names of the dishes, and of the mothers who made them, are never changed by a model.

Customer details never reach a model either. Names, phone numbers and email addresses are removed before a prompt is built and added back on our own server afterwards. That is written into the code, not promised in a policy.

The certificates

Both certificates were presented to Henchu at the India Chapter, New Delhi, on 17 September 2026, signed by Sanjay Puri, Founder & Chairman, Universal AI Awards, Knowledge Networks.

Each one can be checked on the Knowledge Networks site at aihub.knowledgenetworks.org/certificates using its number: KN-18E5323DA1E4 for AI in Food & Beverage (F&B) sector, and KN-5EE4EBD6EA7A for AI Startup of the Year.

See it on the awards’ own pages

• Universal AI Awards, India Chapter winners, the official list, with Henchu under both categories
• Universal AI Awards on Instagram: Henchu, AI in Food & Beverage (F&B) sector
• Universal AI Awards on Instagram: Henchu, AI Startup of the Year
• SiliconIndia: Knowledge Networks hosts the inaugural Universal AI Awards 2026 India Chapter, with the full list of winners

Follow the Universal AI Awards on Instagram, LinkedIn and X. Follow Henchu on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, X and YouTube.

Thank you

The Universal AI Awards are an initiative of Knowledge Networks. Thank you to Sanjay Puri and the Knowledge Networks team. The entries were evaluated by Ernst & Young (EY), and we are grateful for the time they gave a home kitchen’s entry.

Thank you to the India Chapter jury:

• Dr. Avik Sarkar, Faculty and Senior Researcher, Indian School of Business, formerly Head of the Data Analytics Cell, NITI Aayog
• Kavita Bhatia, Scientist G and Group Coordinator, AI & Emerging Technology and Bhashini, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology
• Sujeet Kumar, Member of Parliament
• L. Venkata Subramaniam, formerly Head, IBM Quantum India
• Kalika Bali, Principal Researcher, natural language processing, speech technology and multilingual AI
• Ankit Bose, Head of AI, Nasscom
• Major Vineet Kumar, Founder and Global President, CyberPeace
• Rupali Gupta, Global Head, AI and Platform Engineering, Dunnhumby
• Nemesisa Ujjain, Vice President and Head, The Circle: Founders Club

Most of all, thank you to the mothers of Henchu. The certificates say Henchu, but every proposal and invoice the software sends out is only worth something because of the food you cook.

What comes next

Fifteen mothers cook with us today. Four hundred more are in the pipeline. AI is what lets a home kitchen grow that far and still feel like home.

Taste it in our shop, book us through catering, or see the rest of our coverage on the press page.

Gayathri, founder. Karthik, co-founder.