All About IVFTo celebrate International Women’s Day, Dr Dad wants to challenge stereotypes that limit women and girls. We caught up with Shauravi and Meghana, Co-founders of Slurrp. Slurrp Farm was born in October, 2016, to provide healthy, yummy, and natural food for children.
International Women’s Day – An interview with Shauravi and Meghana, Co-founders of Slurrp Farm.
08-03-2021
We generally do not endorse a lot about outdoor food for the kids. Being a parent myself, I can realise that sometimes it’s so difficult to make your little one feed the right thing.
In an interview with Slurrp team, Dr Dad found out the whole story behind Slurrp. Here’s that for you:
Please tell us about yourself?
Co-founders, Shauravi and Meghana met at a Diwali party in London. According to Shauravi, “It started very innocently. Meghana and I met at a Diwali party in London. We got along like a house on fire from the first time we met. We had some fun business ideas, which we joked about, but we always went back to our jobs the next day. At this point, entrepreneurship seemed too risky.”
When we had children ourselves it all changed. We felt that as parents we were really short of options to feed our children, and at the same time, it also felt like we really should do something about it. It was not a case of taking a business model from another country; it was literally a giant-sized gap which we felt the lack of in our own life. A cursory glance at a supermarket shelf in any metro in India will show you a number of products that are made only with wheat or rice, and contain trans fats and alarming quantities of sugar. For a country that has such an incredible food culture of eating a large variety of grains including millets, this lack of diversity is a gaping hole in our ready-to-eat market.
Shauravi has worked in the Consumer, Healthcare, and Retail Advisory team at J.P. Morgan. She was an Investment Manager at Sir Richard Branson’s Group Holding entity at the Virgin Group in London. She holds a master’s degree in Economics from Cambridge University + BA in Economics from St. Stephen’s College, DU.
Meghana was an Associate Principal at McKinsey & Company in Delhi where she led the public health practice. She holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, a BA in Computation as a Rhodes Scholar from Oxford University + a BE in Computer Science Engineering from Bangalore University. She was on the Indian National Swimming Team for a decade and had represented India at the Asian Games.
Umang Bhattacharyya, our brand director is also a co-founder. Umang is the creative brain of Slurrp Farm. With over 15 years of experience in photography, graphic design, and video art, Umang has given Slurrp Farm its distinctive identity and brand language. Through the course of his creative career, he has done projects for several large multinational clients like ITC, IDEO (USA and Singapore), UNDP, and NGOs like Childline. He has received his formal training in the field of visual arts from the Srishti School of Art, Design, and Technology. Umang is a fantastic cook! He is committed to ensuring that a positive impact on the environment and our children remains the core focus of the brand as it grows.
The founders of Slurrp.
In terms of working together, the entrepreneurial journey is filled with ups and downs. But absolutely none of them have been about working together. To the contrary, the biggest joy has been in not doing this alone. We are genuinely 1+1+1 = 111
Please tell us about your brand? Why you started what you started? Is there a story behind your company?
The idea of Slurrp Farm was conceived when the two friends identified the gap of healthy eating options in the children’s food market in India. When they failed to find high-quality packaged food for their own children, Shauravi and Meghana decided to follow a business idea “close to our heart.”
Slurrp Farm was launched in October 2016, with a mission to provide healthy snack and mealtime options for young children and their parents. And in just over two years, what started as an experiment in our own home kitchens has now turned into a loved kids food brand; available at 600 stores across 3 cities in India, serving close to 7 lakh customers. We also sell across several other leading online platforms including Amazon, BigBasket, FirstCry, and our own website.
This journey has been exhilarating! We don’t come from traditional business families, and we have learned a lot on the go. Meghana jokes that both our roles are really co-chaser 1 and co-chaser 2, and this is what we spend the majority of our time doing; we are both very persistent.
More than Oxford, Cambridge, or Harvard, we have really learned by visiting umpteen number of organic food farmers and companies, raw materials co-operatives and vendors, food technologists, scientists, normal farmers, machinery and equipment manufacturers, small and large food companies, packaging vendors, food retailers, nutritionists, food labs, etc. Not to mention moms and babies and yummy food all along the way! The list is endless. And THIS journey crisscrossed so many parts of India – villages, towns, and large cities – and the food industry has been what has truly shaped our vision for Slurrp Farm.”
In the beginning, while focusing on the quality, and getting just the right set of ingredients for the kind of products we had in mind, we searched, traveled, and taught ourselves. our first product prototype, we figured out how to make a very tasty organic fruit and vegetable purée product for children; we did all the recipes, branding, packaging, and legwork and it was all ready to hit the shelves in literally record time.
Except as we did more market research and tried samples – we realized there was very little demand for it. It would be something we could not scale beyond the affluent Indian parent in the near future. So, we went back to the drawing board and did a tonne of market research, a lot of product R&D, a lot of thinking, and decided to follow our hearts. We realized the answers lay in our own grandmothers’ kitchens. We made cookies with a childhood friend who is the most incredible baker, we dug into ingredients from our childhood but tried to make them tasty and not stodgy. During the pandemic, we realized that so many of us are baking more, so we have launched a range of cakes made with no maida (and in fact no wheat) and no refined sugar.
Every recipe starts on a small scale, and our in-house R&D team then works on making them work at scale without adding preservatives, artificial colors or flavors, trans fats or stabilizers, etc. We have focussed on doing all this while keeping an eye on getting the price-value equation right for the end consumer. It has not been easy is the honest answer! For each product line, we have entered, we have been able to bring together experts for recipe development, commercial scalability, and quality control. And every year along the way, we want to be better than we were the year before, and continue to innovate to have the best product possible.
What do you have in the pipeline?
We plan to take Indian millets to global shelves. We’re working on product innovation with their RD team, nutritionists, and pediatricians, to launch 5 more SKUs in the coming months, taking the existing portfolio to 30 SKUs in all.
Tell us about your products?
Healthy, tasty, and convenient breakfast and mealtime options for young children and families are our focus. We don’t make niche products. We use better quality ingredients – for eg. Millets cost more per kilo than Rice and Wheat. Our product cost c.25% above the comparable product. We feel strongly
that people do not factor in the health impact of eating junk food. If you price in the doctor and long after health effects, we are sure we will be cheaper!
Your range of products includes?
- Single Grain cereals:
- Organic Sprouted Ragi Powder
- Organic Oats Powder
- Organic Brown Rice Powder
- Multi grain cereals:
- Sathu Maavu
- Khichdi Mix
- Millet Oat Porridge (Daliya/Suji substitute)
- Organic Ragi, Almond and Banana Cereal
- Organic Ragi & Rice Cereal: Strawberry
- Organic Ragi & Rice Cereal: Banana (No Sugar)
- Organic Ragi & Rice Cereal: Mango
- Millet Pancakes and Waffle Mixes:
- Banana and Chocolate Chip Pancakes
- Chocolate Ragi Pancakes
- Bluberry Pancakes
- Classic Pancakes
- Millet Dosa:
- Beetroot Oats Dosa
- Spinach Dosa with Lentils and Foxtail Millet
- Superfoods:
- Jaggery powder
- Chia seeds
- Nut powder
- Our fun star-shaped munchies and puffs made with Supergrains like Ragi and Jowar, are flavored and yummy savory/sweet snacking options for little tummies: Mighty Munch: Tangy Tomato and Mighty Puff: Choco Ragi
- Our Bake range includes:
- Vanilla Cake Mix
- Coffee Cake Mix
- Chocolate Cake Mix
- Chocolate Brownie Mix
Dr Dad wished Slurrp all the very best and hope they keep nourishing the young ones in the best possible way.
Wishing you a happy International Womens’ Day 2021
