Jyothi Pappu’s journey of curating healthy recipes with sustainable business

Rapid urbanization is making people turn towards instant foods to match their fast lifestyle. However most foods available in the market are processed with harmful preservatives. Jyothi took this as a challenge to reintroduce lost healthy recipes as far as the porridge. Yes, “The Porridge”, first prepared food of mankind and we have successfully organized “first ever porridge tasting party in India” last December 2021.

Jyothi recollects “I started preparing traditional baby foods for my baby boy in the year 2012 as I wanted to keep him away from all the packaged food stuff. He was really lucky to have all the handcrafted foods by my mom & grand mom. I gifted the same to my friends kids with which they completely fell in love. But it was not an idea to market these until one of my friends suggested to. It was my husband Satish K P (Works as CE at ONGC) who really trusted my idea of handcrafting foods and marketing with traditional recipes with the name “Nutreat” and funded me.  In 2016 December our local super chain market gave us a chance to shelf our products and received a complete different response. People from a village liked it but felt very expensive” She recalls.

However we had a decent business from this super market chain and got offer from local baby shop too. Everything was smooth but the business was upside down when we wanted to introduce the same in the nearby cities. That was a time where everyone used import their baby foods from UK, US and Australia and even the market loaded up with same. People are really not ready to use local Indian foods. It took nearly 1 year to get a decent customer base and by the year 2017 our customers were upper middle class and highly influential. Every thing was word of mouth they loved the concept of stone grinding and experienced it live.

Pandemic – The Game Changer

In the year 2020 when the whole world was in lock down we worked hard and sent the parcels with high risk as many babies were dependent on our foods and even the pregnant women. We got permission from our district collector and shipped all the parcels pan India with out any delay during the first lock down.

At same time in collaboration with an NGO -Smart Village Movement we took the step of employing more rural women who lost their jobs due to pandemic. However convincing rural women to work with stone grinders was not that easy, we had to offer them double the price. While even convincing new customers during pandemic also gave us a challenge. They were quite afraid of the safety till we made our services live. Yes we handcrafted Nutreat live, we made them watch their order live on Insta, FB and even personal WhatsApp calls.

Customers were really impressed and even our order rate raised at once with our unique approach. Now we have 120+ rural women (20 optional) associated with us who really handcraft the foods for babies, women, everyday care and seasonal jams, cookies etc. Everything is done on pre-order basis and no single tin is stored. It’s fresh, real and healthy” She says.

Inspired by traditions

While the industry is buzzing with several baby and health foods, Nutreat works completely in reverse direction. All the recipes were inspired by lost traditional recipes of India and other countries which were slightly modified for this generation.

Jyothi says “I grew up listening to stories on India, its culture, mythology and heritage this made me fell in love with it. So travelling the journey of restoring traditional food habits of India. Every recipe has its own story and uniqueness. I love digging into our traditional recipes and talking a lot with elders whenever possible. My best friend Swetha N joined me in this journey as Managing Director during pandemic who shares her part in designing recipes sometimes.

We customize foods according to customers choice which is our USP and all recipes are seasonal and crafted with 100% local ingredients procured from small farmers who grow naturally. Till now we have teamed up with 11 farmers all over India.

The Porridge story

While handcrafting baby and other health foods I wanted to re-introduce mankind’s first prepared food porridge and educate the people about its health benefits over any other beverages.

In this we have organised India’s first ever Porridge Tasting Party where we served 6 instant porridges for about 20 members who are foodies, health lovers, Doctors etc. This was a grand success and took Nutreat to next level where many Franchisee enquires happened and now we are ready to open 2 Franchise outlets in Bangalore and Hyderabad in the month of February.

Jyothi beats many copycats with her unique recipe strategy and customizing Nutreat according to customers’ choice. They have almost 130+ handcrafted foods for all age groups starting from the 6^th month and customized around 7000+ recipes. Of all Protein rich porridge, Nutri 28, Ragi Almond are hot cakes while seasonal jams would never been kept behind.

Jyothi claims the company increased its revenue more than four times in 2021, and the target is to double it this year.

For more information – https://www.nutreatlife.com/