Don't Sacrifice Taste for Health! Quick and Healthy Breakfast Ideas from a Brand That's Bent On Making You Eat Healthy in Easy Ways (2021)

True Elements was the solution part of it, of how can we provide food that is completely natural. Today health is a very highly abused word. People can do anything with health because consumers don't understand the finer details. I can claim something to be sugar free and yet add jaggery. Even the FSSAI guidelines say that if you have less than 5% chemicals you don't have to show it on your labels.

So how do you still make sure that it is point zero zero percent and not just less than 5%, that was the intent of launching True Elements. We will not add sugar, we will not add any chemicals, we will make sure it is a hundred percent whole grain. And all said and done, we are not going to have healthy food which is tasty but we will have tasty food which is healthy because when it comes to food we realised people might say they want healthy food but at the end of the day, it's taste that wins hands down every time. How do we still make sure the food is devoid of any bad stuff and the taste is not compromised, that is how we started.

We created an online company, we created a distribution organisation, we started going to corporates in terms of alliances doing activations with them, but where things went off track was when it came to assessing how much business. When you are running a business you should not take your eyes off the ball or the cash close. And it's all a game of profits and expenses so I assumed a certain scale.

I told myself that if I have done business with eleven hundred crores then I can definitely do three crores of my own. And if I am going to do three crores it's better to spend on good people, it's better to spend on a good place on rent, spend on other things, and so the expenses also correspondingly inflated. It was when my month one sale was around fifteen thousand rupees that I think realism sort of hit me and I said okay, it's a big difference between three crore and fifteen thousand. That's the part when it sort of dawned on me this is a different world, let's not operate with the assumption that you have done everything. That's how it started.

Also the same value-system still continues for all the people in that organisation with the same passion and diligence that our consumers want, we will not compromise on that. That is something that we want to achieve. On an aspiration level you want to be one of the top ten global brands who are clean and that is something we believe that at a global level we should achieve in the next five to eight years, but at the same time I think our first presumption, our first aspiration is that people should love us and an Indian should trust us, that this is the brand that our household requires and we should buy it. That's what we want.

At the same time it's not just the raw material but there are a lot of processes internally to the final good that we have captured to make sure that the quality is not compromised. Something as simple as the temperature, it should not be heated otherwise after a certain temperature the seeds lose their nutrient value. So how do you make sure that the temperature is not crossed even while packing?

There are multiple detectors to find out even small details and mechanisms to catch anything that was over roasted. I would not say we are perfect despite all this. I think we are also evolving and as we grow we add more checks and balances to show that we get better and better in every aspect of production and packaging.

There is the ready to cook segment, something that current households in India consume. Some of them might be at national level, some of them at regional level and we get a version which is cleaner for us, that's the part that we stand for. We say clean level but consumers don't understand the word clean level as it is still a very technical term for people who think it must be something good but regular. We don't say I am going to buy clean level products, so for us that's the brief of new products - whenever we launch a new product we focus on the taste.

Based on whatever is currently available, we try to understand the taste buds of the consumer and we say, 'okay they like something sweet but they also want something tangy, so can we create a product in that space and make some snacks for them'. Snacks is a separate segment but again that's probably 30% of our R&D and 70% of what is consumed by Indians today. So we work backwards.

Other forces enabled us to predominantly use technology for everything in the house like whether it is our ERP, our analytics or the personalisation that we have. Now we have this tech infrastructure with us where whatever we are sourcing we have every sort of information to the last mile. We said we have this framework, why not connect all of it. Our regional launch timeline is something we were planning for almost three years. It just requires a certain set of infrastructure so we were originally planning to launch this feature in 2021. But then what happened last year, in March-April the pandemic hit and we said this is exactly the time when people will think about what they eat, how they buy, where they buy it from; why not pre-pone it, work a bit more, and get it launched. That's why we launched it last year. But the basic principle was to build trust in our customers.

And obviously try and read the ingredients. If there is a name that you don't understand you should look it up, for if there are too many names that they don't understand then there is probably something amiss. That is a new way to mask artificial and unhealthy ingredients, by putting a scientific name so as regular people we don't understand what is in the product. I think this is it. All of us have to love what we eat.