NUTRIPLATE: One Stop Solution for Healthy Packaged Goods and Cooked Meals

Shaloo Tewari and her daughter, Ikshita Tewari is on a mission to bring about a healthy change in our lives. Nutriplate, a company that they have founded together, is all about healthy, wholesome and home-made breakfast cereals, mid-meal snacks, and protein powders among other products. Nutriplate strives to contribute towards finding a better, healthier, and fitter version of ourselves. Nutriplate- healthy meals and packaged goods   BV: What was your thought/idea behind venturing into the food space? What’s your business philosophy and model? Shaloo Tiwari: As an entrepreneur, I have always worked towards identifying market needs and bridging gaps in the society through my product. 2 years back, we realized that health and mid-meal snacks don’t go together in India. Without realizing, Indians have been consuming calories during their chai breaks every day that is leading to many health and weight-related problems. That is when we came up with calorie-counted, home-cooked, healthy breakfast cereals, and namkeen mixtures that are the perfect solution for all your mid-meal cravings. Two years later, we have been able to identify ourselves as a brand that believes in the wellbeing of the body and mind. We offer carefully curated, healthy, and most importantly, tasty meals from breakfast to dinner that have just the right amount of calories and nutrients required by the body. We are now in the process of opening a café and experience center that will offer customers a holistic and healthy environment with food and activities contributing to their overall wellbeing.   BV: Your business is based out of Lucknow, a non-metro city. What difference do you find in terms of the risks, challenges, and mindset with respect to the business environment? Shaloo Tiwari: We have witnessed a very noticeable inclination towards health and wellness in non-metro cities recently. The consumer is more aware today and wants to eat healthy and live a healthier life irrespective of the city that they are from. Over the past two years, we have realized that there is a high demand for healthy food but people don’t want to compromise on taste. Consumers are no longer willing to go on salad and liquid diets to lose weight. They want to ensure that the food they eat is giving their body the required nutrition. People from non-metro cities have lesser options to choose from. Many dishes that are an absolute hit in the metros have not reached the non-metros due to lack of supply. We introduced a lot of new dishes to the market that didn’t exist earlier. Our menu has a mix of Mexican and Lebanese dishes among others. Also, the majority of our products are made from superfoods and millets. Introducing them to the Lucknow consumers was a risk that we took but we have received an amazing response and the demand is only increasing with time as more people are learning about the importance of including superfoods in their diets. As a brand, we understand what the consumer is looking for. We try to innovate as much as we can to tend to the demands of our customers. In fact, we noticed a demand for ready-to-cook food in the market during the COVID lockdown. This is when we launched a subsidiary brand, Home some, on Swiggy that offers ready-to-cook, healthy and homemade meals. We have also started Frost, a brand that offers frozen, healthy dishes that you can heat and eat when you like.   BV: In the current situation, what challenges are you facing in your business? What steps have you taken to mitigate/overcome those? Shaloo Tiwari: Sustenance in a highly brand-aware market - Health food is not a new space. There is enough literature available online for anyone to understand what is good/bad for them. We have a very high rate of competition as well. We have taken all our business decisions keeping this in mind and have been able to create a market for our products in different verticals. Whether it was using the right products, marketing the right way, or reaching out to the right audience, we have done it all and have created a name for ourselves in the industry. Financial - For a bootstrapped startup, resources are limited. And that was the case with Nutriplate as well. That could have hindered our growth and expansion but we have been able to overcome all the problems. We upskilled our existing employees instead of hiring, we avoided retail stores and collaborated with Amazon, Flipkart and Bigbasket to avoid the extremely high retail prices and we started our restaurant journey with cloud kitchen to avoid real estate costs. Ethical Standards (Healthy, non-preservative products) - We are proud of what we stand for - healthy food with no added preservatives and we ensure that all our products are extremely ethically produced. This has definitely come in the way of expansion because it reduces shelf life among other problems. But we decided to hold our ground and continue to serve products that we truly believe in and that are ethically produced by Nutriplate’s standards. We have been able to find extremely creative ways of not letting this come in the way of the brand’s expansion and we have come up with new recipes in the process that are relatively quite new in the Indian food market. Overall, our ethical practices that could have been a roadblock actually helped us innovate and become a much better version of ourselves. Home made ingredients, no preservatives BV: What kind of support do you expect from the government for businesses such as yours?  Shaloo Tiwari: Healthy restaurants have to go the extra mile to maintain the hygiene and safety standards of the food they offer. In fact, Swiggy and Zomato have started conducting quality checks in restaurants to ensure hygiene standards. We feel that a similar process by the government will act as an additional source of validation for such restaurants and will help us attract more customers, especially in the post COVID world. We work with skilled workers to produce good quality products and our brand has found a market for itself in the country. Our loyal customers give us confidence and we believe that there is a much bigger audience out there that we have not been able to reach due to limited resources. Government schemes at low-interest rates and technical support will help startups such as ours to scale up and expand to a larger market. A healthy box looks like this BV: Any word of advice for upcoming food start-ups? Shaloo Tiwari: Before you start, ensure that your product is identifying a gap in the market. A gap generally means that there is no or limited supply to the consumer demand in the market. By doing so, you have already ensured a market for yourself who would not hesitate to try your product. Given the current circumstances, it is very important to ensure safety and hygiene. That should be of utmost priority for you if you want your customers to be loyal. Word of mouth is the best kind of marketing and that would happen only if your product is good. Hence, it is important to test your product multiple times with different users to ensure that. For more such updates, follow us on Facebook and  Instagram. Download our magazine Spunky Indian for exclusive stories.