Melbourne e-entrepreneurs have high hopes for Jafflechutes

We've heard about pop-up eateries, but what about float-down jaffles?

After a successful crowd-sourcing campaign, a Melbourne toasted sandwich-making start-up called Jafflechutes is parachuting toasted sandwiches from the skies at set locations around Melbourne and has plans to expand to the US this month.

Adam Grant, who co-founded Jafflechutes with friends David McDonald and Huw Parkinson last August, says Melbourne is ideally suited to Jafflechutes owing to its abundance of inner-city laneways.

"It means we can operate away from thoroughfares in the knowledge that we're not going to interfere with traffic," he says.

The concept behind Jafflechutes is simple. They announce their next planned event, people place jaffle orders online, then the precise location is revealed via social media.

"So it's a slow reveal over a few days about the location, the time, the ingredients, that kind of thing," Grant says.

"For example, they might order two cheese and tomato jaffles at 7pm for Alex. So at 7pm we make them, write the name on the bag, and chute them down."

The story of how Jafflechutes came into existence sounds like a modern social media-age fairytale. As Grant tells it, the three founders booked a cabin in the remote country Victorian town of Yandoit via Airbnb, but when they arrived they discovered it had no electricity.

"So we had to sit in the dark and cold just talking rather than playing on YouTube or whatever," he recalls. "It was confronting. we talked about a lot of stuff that night, but the one thing that really came out of it was the concept behind Jafflechuting."