Read full article By Rekha Balakrishnan @ HerStory Photo Credit: Slurrp
Started by Shauravi Malik, Meghana Narayan, and Umang Bhattacharyya, Slurrp Farm offers healthy and preservative-free snack options for children made from traditional grains. The brand has seen 3x growth during the pandemic.
Shauravi Malik and Meghana Narayan don’t call themselves Co-founders of Slurrp Farm. They would like to be called co-chasers, as that’s what they spend the majority of their time doing, being persistent with their ideas and taking them forward.
The two friends started Slurrp Farm in October 2016 when they realised most supermarket shelves only stocked products made with wheat or rice for children. These contained trans fats and alarming quantities of sugar, not exactly a healthy option.
“For a country that has such an incredible food culture of eating a large variety of grains including millets, this lack of diversity was a gaping hole in our ready-to-eat-market,” Meghana recalls.
The two friends, who met at a Diwali party in London, got along like a house on fire and began discussing fun business ideas. But they always went back to their jobs the next day as entrepreneurship seemed to be too risky at that point in time.
Meghana grew up in Bengaluru and was a national-level swimmer for India. She received the Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford, after which she pursued an MBA from Harvard Business School. She worked at McKinsey for seven years.
Shauravi grew up in New Delhi and studied economics at Cambridge University. She worked in the consumer, healthcare, and retail advisory team and the leveraged finance team at JP Morgan. She was also an investment manager at Sir Richard Branson’s group holding entity at Virgin Group in London.
The duo was joined by Umang Bhattacharyya, 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.
But why snacks for children? When both of them had children, things changed. As parents, they found they were short of options and wanted to do something about it.
“Our research showed that with one in four children obese or overweight, India is the third most obese nation in the world. Malnourishment occurs at both ends of the spectrum; it is not only due to poverty, but also because of a diet that is rich in sugar, salt, and junk food with preservatives, artificial flavours, and colours.
“The market size of the opportunity is large, and we felt we had to change things for the better and be a force for good,” Shauravi says.
