20 February,2022 08:39 AM IST | Mumbai | Anju Maskeri
Blueberry millet pancake
Meghana Narayan, who worked at the Public Health practice at McKinsey & Company and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, remembers how her mother would force a ragi drink down her throat. "After I became a mother myself, I began thinking how we could come up with a yummy way to eat ragi," she says. She began scouting for high-quality and nutritious food options for children, but failed to find anything worthy. So she decided to take matters in her own hands.
Slurrp Farm is a millet-based children's food brand launched by Narayan and Shauravi Malik, who was previously part of the consumer, healthcare, and retail advisory team at JP Morgan. The duo is working to revive the use of supergrains by offering it in the form of healthy snacks and mealtime options for young children and adults. Through its innovative portfolio of millet, ragi and oats-based packaged food products (priced R200 onwards), which they claim is devoid of preservatives, artificial flavours and colours), Slurrp Farm wants to inculcate healthy eating habits. Malik says it took them five years of extensive research and introspection to realise that the answers lay in their grandmothers' kitchens. "We dug into recipes our grandmums favoured, revisited ingredients like millets from our own childhoods and found ways to make them tasty." The pandemic only propelled their journey forward by bringing about a structural change in people's health choices, including the need to consume a healthy diet. The brand offers puffed snacks, millet pancake mix, millet dosa mix, cereals, cookies, sprouted ragi cereal, millets and oats porridge, date powder and natural sugars.
Chocolate millet cake
According to Narayan, our pattern of eating and the nutrition content of our meals have dramatically changed over the years. "In fact, an alarming number of children are developing health problems and allergies related to unhealthy diets - childhood obesity is on the rise and children are at a greater risk of developing lifestyle disorders. All of these problems can be addressed if people bring about some change to their daily food choices - eating real, wholesome food, bringing in grain diversity and breaking the cycle of eating wheat and rice, and going back to traditional ancient food wisdom hold the key for tackling the problems we are faced with," she says. Millets, along with plant proteins such as lentils, legumes and chickpeas form the base of a large proportion of their products. For instance, the sprouted ragi powder, which the founders say is an ideal first food for little ones, has 10 times the calcium of wheat and rice. "Sprouting ragi increases the protein content and makes nutrients easier to absorb," says Malik. The spinach multigrain dosa is made using a blend of foxtail millets, dals (urad, chana and moong), natural spinach powder, and a mix of mild spices. While foxtail millet is a rich source of protein, the dals are high in plant-based proteins and minerals. Additionally, spinach is rich in carotenoids, Vitamin K1, folic acid, iron, and calcium, which makes it a wholesome snack. To make millet palatable, they offer it in the form of noodles: the little millet noodles and the foxtail millet noodles. "Both of these are baked and not fried and come with a tastemaker made with 100 per cent natural spices. Little millet is a rich source of phosphorus while foxtail millet is also considered a rich source of vitamin," explains Malik.
Meghana Narayan and Shauravi Malik say they launched the brand as a response to unhealthy meals that children often end up consuming
Ensuring that the snacks score well on the taste metre was important, she says given that their TG are children. "Kids never lie! So unlike adults, they don't try to avoid hurting your feelings. In one taste test, we went with six products to a group of 150 kids. They didn't like the ones we had picked as our favourites. The kids found them bland," says Narayan. Another time, they found that most mothers were making cakes and pancakes out of baby cereals. "And we realised that there is a need for millet-based cakes and pancakes. That is how we entered this category," she says.
The double chocolate cake mix is made using a blend of jowar, oats and amaranth and real chocolate. "In the early days, all of these recipes were developed in our home kitchens. We then worked with a nutritionist to fine tune the recipes, and eventually onboarded two specific food consultants who helped us manufacture the recipes at a commercial scale." They are working on product innovation with nutritionists and paediatricians, to take their existing portfolio to 30 products.
>> âSnack-A-Doodle was in the works for two years and launched formally in April 2021. The products are gluten-free, and contain no eggs, processed sugar, or preservatives. "We were born in the second wave of the pandemic so we have lived through both the hard time of getting our product into consumer hands and also the boon of moms willing to give new things a try online given they were locked at home," says baker Radhieka Pandeya, who teamed up with Simer Dhalll, a business school graduate, for the venture. Their range include âbites', which are their version of bars for kids, cookies and a do-it-yourself baking kit. "Our hottest seller is the vanilla milkshake cookie, which like its name suggests replicates the flavour of milkshake in a cookie," says Pandeya.
>> âYoga Bar, led by sister-entrepreneurs Suhasini Sampath and Anindita Sampath Kumar, has entered the children's nutritional snacking segment. The Yo Chos and Yo Fills are chocolate flavoured, multi-grain cereals for kids and contain whole grains (jowar, bajra, ragi, quinoa, oats) and moong and channa dal. Available at an introductory price of R10 per sachet, the brand aims to penetrate price-sensitive markets beyond Tier 1 cities.
