Great post off of Metafilter by ocherdraco…

Reportedly their mistake rate is just 1 in 16 million deliveries, which caused the Forbes Global magazine to award its Six Sigma certification in 2001.

For nearly 130 years, Mumbai’s Dabbawallas have been delivering lunches from customers’ homes to their workplaces and taken the empty tiffin boxes back again. The service, with its origins in the mid 1880s when a single textile mill worker paid an errand boy to bring him his lunch from home, is a complex system with in which color coded lunch boxes are passed from Dabbawalla to Dabbawalla to reach their destination, creating a network that, in many ways, resembles the Internet itself.

Despite that resemblance, the service itself is decidedly low-tech (scroll down in that link for “The Logistics of Dabbawalla”).  The 5,000 Dabbawallas are divided into autonomous operating groups of 30-35 (including five Dabbawallas who aren’t part of the regular supply chain, but are there to pick up slack and reroute stray boxes) whose only points of contact are lunch box handoffs. The Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association (as the organization has been formally called since 1968), has embraced the internet as a means of promotion, however. Their website, mydabbawalla.org, invites users to schedule service via SMS and to friend the service on Facebook. One of the reasons for the success of the system is that it’s built on personal relationships: each Dabbawalla (like the one in this New York Times piece) has built up a loyal customer base over the years.