NOVEMBER 20168IN MY OPINIONCHANCES, CHANGES & CHALLENGESBy Chandrashekhar Basavanna, Co-Founder, OrgTree India.Headquartered in Bengaluru, OrgTree is the expert in creating gluten free snacks with zero trans-fat and cholesterol free millet based products that are rich in dietary fiber and minerals. The term snack usually brings about ideas of tasty, but greasy, decadent, sugary and completely unhealthy foods. The term healthy, invokes exactly the opposite. Today, there are a slew of startups focussed on helping people switch to healthier alternatives keeping the snacks tasty. The behaviour of the average consumer of snacks is changing from just relying on it for taste to using it as a quick meal supplement. It is this very change that has got in a growing number of players to the space. It is believed that urban India has a big demand for these ready-to-eat snacks. However, the pro-cessed foods market is one of the most competi-tive and difficult to break into. It is heavily scale dependent and is fairly resource intensive. These companies not only have to compete with large corporations like Nestle, Unilever, and their likes, but also have to create a loyal following among consumers. Initially the shift was only observed in the 28-50 year olds who wanted to lead healthier lives; but now all segments are slowly moving to more conscious eating choices, including what goes in the snacks that kids take to school, to what kind of food is consumed outside, all of urban India is slowly making healthier food choices. This brings up quite a few challenges for these start-ups, considering the conscious eater has gone from needing acceptable taste to wanting to eat both healthy and tasty foods. These companies are often smaller businesses and food start-ups who know what their customer needs and rarely find in the largely fried and sugary ready to eat snacks landscape. Often those companies are run Chandrashekhar Basavanna
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