Shauravi Malik and Meghana Narayan | Co-Founders, Slurrp Farm

Q. Introduction: Tell us about yourself and your background:

Slurrp Farm We are both mother’s to very young children ourselves and have experienced the trials and tribulations of feeding them. We are passionate about raising awareness of healthy eating for children and giving busy parents like us, the convenience needed in terms of being able to find food options which are as good as what we would make at home.

How we met each other was serendipitous. Although it feels like we have known each other forever. A mutual friend asked Shauravi to go for Meghana’s Diwali dinner. Needless to say, the food was yum! This led to much more cooking, eating, laughter and fun business ideas. When we had our own children, we felt an acute need for food options where we could just understand the ingredients at the back of the label and trust them to not be junk food. And so Slurrp Farm was born from the kitchen of two mother’s who love to cook.

Before we started Slurrp Farm together, Meghana used to lead the public health practise at McKinsey India. She has an MBA from Harvard Business School, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and has a Computer Science Engineering degree from Bangalore University. Shauravi used to work for Sir Richard Branson’s Group Holding entity at the Virgin Group in London, and in the Consumer, Healthcare and Retail Investment Banking team, as well as the Leveraged Finance and Restructuring Advisory team at JP Morgan in London. She has studied Economics at Cambridge University and at St. Stephen’s College in Delhi University.

Q. Tell us about the company you have set up – when did you set it up, what products or services do you provide, what is your target market? Why did you set up the company? / What drove you to become an Entrepreneur?

Our company Slurrp Farm was borne out of our mutual love for food (cooking and eating and feeding our friends and family!) and we began our journey in October 2016.

Slurrp Farm is a leading young Indian food brand attempting to change the way young kids are eating around India. We currently make cereals and cookies for kids, but we have a whole lot of other fun food ideas brewing in the Slurrp Farm kitchen for a much wider range of audience! Breakfast and snack options for children; Prenatal, postnatal and getting back in shape for mother’s and Nutrition options for elderly people.

Why we started it: When we became mother’s, our first big challenge was how can we feed our kids right, whilst being working parents and very short on time. And also, like all new mother’s, it was extremely important for us to know what we should be eating to lose the baby weight quick, while keeping our energy levels high to do everything we wanted to do in the day.

In the long term, we want to drive an inflexion, or a REAL change in the health food market: Our intention is to be market-makers who create a bottom-up market for this. We want people on the journey with us who will back this for long term.

What drove us to do this is that we feel in our gut that there are several problems with the food chain today. The contamination at every level is having frightening repercussions on societal health outcomes. We fundamentally believe that we need to change how we are eating as a society. Not little tweaks which are about replacing ingredient X with ingredient Y. But the fundamental notion that drives us is that we need to eat like our grandparents did. The food options that we make available on a shelf, are the same as what it would be if we were to make it at home. As consumers, we are all poor on time, but that doesn’t mean we should compromise on food ingredient quality. There have been tremendous improvements in packaging which we have used and will use to support us in this endeavour.

Q. What has been your biggest challenge in achieving your success?

Our biggest challenge has been time and remaining patient. And the sheer difficulty of making something you would in your own kitchen, work from a commercial and process perspective on a larger scale.

On the time front, things have taken just that wee bit longer than anticipated. This has also been due to the fact that we have approached our work from a point of view of not compromising at all on the product quality.

On the guiding principle that it should be just like I would make in my own kitchen, this has slowed us, but also helped us. We feel we were able to stand back and ask ourselves, what is really wrong with the way we eat. How can we try to make a small step in trying to change that. We have been able to start with a clean slate – No transfat – ie no dalda or edible vegetable oils or hydrogenated fats, no palm oil, no invert syrup or golden syrup, no high fructose corn syrup, little to no maida. All the things which make food products cheap, addictive and make us spend money on long term illnesses.

Q. What has been your greatest achievement so far?

We want to engage with kids and families by communicating with them through our unique (and if we may say so ourselves – beautiful!) brand identity, which we have worked SO very hard on. When a customer holds a Slurrp Farm product in their hand – we want them to feel tremendous pride at holding a beautiful Made in India product in their hands. We don’t need to import food for our children from elsewhere. Our goal was to be the best we could be in every sense. To incorporate Indian food traditions into the recipes, use the best possible ingredients, create a global identity, and still be priced at an Indian price point. It’s been hard work but we feel we have achieved a small measure of it.

Q. Who has been your biggest inspiration?

For both of us, the greatest inspiration in this sphere has been our own grandmother’s and mother’s. When Nandita (Meghana’s daughter) was born, she is the one who shared the recipe for the Ragi and Moong cereal with her, and it has come to life as a Slurrp Farm cereal. We both come from foodie families and it is what makes us passionate about eating good food.

Q. How do you balance your work life and home life?

With a lot of help from our village. We simply cannot do it without FOUR sets of very, very supportive parents and parents-in laws, who are the reason our home life functions and our children are growing up loving each day. Aunties and uncles, cousins and friends. And first and foremost, our husbands – who are the first camp that faces our absence the most. They believe in us more than our we do ourselves. We are both tremendously lucky and grateful in this respect.

Q. What advice do you have for women starting out on their own?

(We would love to write a book about this or mentor young women, because this is a subject so close to our hearts.)

We see a lot of young people nowadays who feel this sense of pressure to achieve one’s life’s legacy before they are even 30. Workforce structures need to be more adaptive to longer working lives. Because the unfortunate downside of capitalism is that in most instances both couples need to work longer to pay off a mortgage.

Our advice would be around how to embrace calmer, gentler versions of ourselves. The feeling of your early 20s that you can do ANYTHING, is exhilarating but can be disheartening when you have a child. But know that in your 30s and 40s, if you think hard about it, in the midst of diapers, drama and teenage trauma, you would have found YOUR thing. It won’t be everything, it won’t even be what you thought it would be. But go with the flow of life.

Our careers in this day and age, more so for millenials, are a mosaic of stories. It’s up to us to choose which parts of the story we want to be better at.

Lastly: mums: please bring up your sons up to be like daughters, so life is different for your daughter in laws. Be the change you want to see, in your own life. That can mean many things – in the workforce enable younger women, be honest with them. In the workforce, pay women an equal wage. You will be shocked at what we see about this. Across the board from factory line worker to big corporate, women are paid less. Sometimes women make that decision, so let’s change it. See this as a profit to your employees, not a cost to your business.

And lastly, be that awesome mom or mom-in law who enables your daughters to be what they want to be – by being there for the kids, or if you hate that, starting a business with them.

Q. Can you recommend any organisations or networking groups that have particularly helped you on your journey?

Our friends from our lives so far – both personal and professional have always been so amazingly supportive. The best networks are the ones that trust you and know you.

Q. If you could ask for one thing to help propel your business what would it be?

A fairy godmother who can run super fast!

Q. What does the future hold for you?

The future in a broad sense is to fix some of what we feel is currently out of balance. And to do this not just for the middle and upper segments of society, but also make a genuine contribution to addressing malnourishment across the board for poorer people too.