2022-01-02
Kalyani Chavali
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Kalyani Chavali founder at Sahrudaya Foods

About me and my family:

A Family of Four My father, a mechanical engineering professor, believes in leading a simple and happy life. My mother does not possess any materialistic pleasures. She is a person who can make everyone happy with her presence. My little sister is very young and is 8 years younger than me. And I, not so different from them, always managed to irritate them with my choices and my way of doing things. Yes, we are a typical South Indian family. Things were all right until my higher secondary! That's the first time I discovered my entrepreneurial side. Traveling on pathetic city buses every day made me do a small internship at the PMPML office. During my internship, I looked into their financial reports and bus routes and heard complaints from drivers and conductors for the first time. And I wanted to solve it! 16-year old me tried to fix some problems by making an app and developing new advertising strategies to increase their revenue, but I was inexperienced and was a bit childish in my approach. That's when I realized how happy I was when I tried to solve a problem and build things on my own. But this made my family upset! They dreamt of me as a good engineer working at a big firm. To add, I wanted to complete my graduation in Mumbai city, where drugs and parties were the first impressions in my parents' minds. But when I was admitted to the Institute of Chemical Technology in Mumbai, all their worries went away, and they finally agreed to let me study in Mumbai.

I was taught great lessons by great professors in the morning, and the second half was about observing the magical city, which never slept nor got easily tired. People of different classes and races got united in the name of work and would just work. I have never seen a city where everyone happily accepts the fact that they must work hard. Both the city and the college changed a lot of my old-school perspectives.

And then the biggest change, the COVID-19 lockdown, made me postpone my plans for higher studies abroad and join as a research fellow at Vigyan Ashram under Dr. Arun Dixit and Dr. J.B Joshi. I was doing my research on finding different ways to tackle vitamin D deficiency. My research was conducted in a small village called Pabal, 60 km away from Pune city. It was there that I met Reshma Tai, who used to make and sell tasty moringa leaf chikkis. Initially, I helped her to get more customers and would market her products in my family groups, friends' circles, etc. But slowly, I got involved completely. From standardising the whole recipe to marketing it! I did not even imagine myself starting a food processing startup, but then that is what God or some other power wanted me to do. The idea is that our Indian authentic food made by these villagers should come out and be presented to everyone globally.

The experiments began after I studied a lot of food industries, food recipes, and food manufacturing. Around 70 different moringa chikkis were tried as I wanted to eliminate the use of glucose liquid and vanaspati ghee. Many said you graduated from a renowned institute, but here you are in a kitchen making chikkis. But I never felt any difference between working in the lab with glassware and here with steel and ironware.

My motivation is the vision of collaborating with village women, training them, and then providing consumers with a lot of good food options that are very close to nature. Food is an excellent source of chemistry, biology, physics, and mathematics.Food is fuel for the most sophisticated machines on this planet, so imagine how important it is to study its properties and characteristics.

It's been 9 months since the start of our small startup, Sahrudaya. And currently, we have six different products serving customers across India with more than 500 regular customers.

The initial days were very tough. Making the chikkis and ladoo, taking them to the city, convincing retailers to resell them, and failing at the end. For every business, finding your customers is very important, and I found the correct customer base during the second wave of COVID-19, as we sent many of our products to covid-care centres as a nutrition care package. We got a great audience who believed in us and has supported us ever since. My partner was my mother, who supported me, shouted at me at all times, and ensured I achieved more and more. She is best at handling the workforce. All my female workforce love her more than me, and that's good because now she handles all the inside of the manufacturing while I look after the sales and marketing. Being a mother and a health-conscious yoga practitioner, she does her best and ensures the quality of the food is great. Soon, our online sales increased! I still feel sad that the common people are badly trapped by big FMCGs who believe glossy-packed chips to be way more hygienic than our products. Many say that " Agar online acha hai to thik hai" but what about the common people? Should they eat any crap and die? I will soon crack that and become a competitor to all of these 10 rs chips and junk.

Sahrudaya currently:

Today, we are a team of seven women, with a small partner team of women who are our resellers. Our strength is our women! We do not make high profits, so more than money, our motivation is these women who show up daily happily despite their family issues. We have products from two villages in India, and our mantra is to have less of the refining process and to use ingredients directly from farms rather than polished ones. We serve across India and have made major deliveries to California and New Zealand. We also collaborated with various old-age homes, women's and child care centres and provided nutritional RTE snacks to these institutes.

Biggest Challenge:

Established FMCGs have tricked our minds. Now, changing our established mindsets is the biggest task.

One thing that I would change:

I believe all my wrong decisions have impacted me in a good way in my life. But surely, one thing I would change about myself is judging myself every time something goes wrong.

Reinvent oneself:

There is no time limit, I believe. Being brought up, I have always been told that everything has the right age to do. There is a right age to get educated, a right age to get married. But, in my opinion, every age is appropriate for making your own decision and starting from scratch. There will be different types of difficulties at each stage, but the struggle and showing up even when you don't feel like it will remain constant.

You can find our products on www.sahrudayafoods.com or Mitti ke Rang : https://mittikerang.org/collections/sahrudaya

Instagram @sahrudaya.foods

Mitti Ke Rang is a Social Venture working towards generating livelihood for women through its E-commerce portal all over the world. This helps these Women Entrepreneurs to sell their products and generate employment.

Kalyani Chavali

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Kalyani Chavali founder at Sahrudaya Foods

Kalyani Chavali

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