IIT Delhi batch mates Badal and Sumit have decided to bring a breeze of freshness in your world of healthy eating. Their venture FRSH aims “to make healthy food accessible to Urban India. We deliver healthy and fresh breakfast/snacks/juices at doorstep.”
So how did this journey begin? “After graduating from IIT, Badal worked with Carrier Air Conditioners, the Aditya Birla Group, and American Express, before conceptualizing the idea of FRSH. Sumit joined Badal from Lodha Group. Sumit previously worked for over five years with McKinsey & Co., and holds an MBA from IIM Bangalore.”
Like many ventures we have featured before, we see the founders make a personal connection with the issue they are trying to address. Badal and Sumit decided to answer the question that plagues most office goers in the morning, “What to have for breakfast?” “FRSH was born out of this common everyday conundrum of a regular office-goer. A staggering 20 per cent of working professionals skip breakfast, due to the non-availability of healthy, value-for-money food every morning. FRSH solves that everyday problem by offering fresh and healthy food that one can order daily without getting bored or burning a hole in their pocket. And the name FRSH captures the essence of our food – it is as fresh as it gets!”
Gauging the potential for such a concept would have been pretty much a no brainer.“ Since we are solving a common problem faced by almost all office-goers every day, the potential market is obviously huge. There is a visible shift in the lifestyle and eating habits of young people, who are increasingly adopting healthy food and saying no to junk food. And at FRSH, we are proud and happy to be a part of this revolution of sorts.”
With a “fresh” concept,there is always the challenge of acceptance initially. “One of the biggest challenges for us was to convince the average consumer that healthy food need not be out-of-reach for everyday consumption. We sensed a mind-set that healthy food needs to be exotic, expensive, and not very tasty. If you see now, our menu tells a different story. We are going ahead with our vision of making healthy food easily accessible to people across India.”
We did take a look at their menu and here are some of the things we found- “Bircher Museli Parfait, Bran Protein Crush, Honey Loops Mousse” and a lot more. FRSH gives us an insight into the menu planning “Designing the menu is hard work indeed! There are several aspects that we need to be careful about. Each menu item that we offer has to be healthy and calorie-counted. The taste should be unique and something that the consumer will want to come back for. From a business perspective, we need to consider scalability – menu items should be such that we can make them in large quantities without impacting quality and delivery time.”
Response? “We have received a fabulous response from our customers in Gurgaon. Our Zomato rating is consistently high at 4.6, which is great considering how fast we are scaling up. We also have an enviable repeat order rate of over 70%. We get a lot of love and suggestions from our customers, which we listen to intently and keep improving our services based on the feedback. We are in the process of launching multiple customer engagement initiatives like loyalty program, subscription packages, weekly/daily specials, referral program, combos, mobile app, order tracking to further make our consumer addicted to FRSH.”
Despite all the hard work the team at FRSH tell future food entrepreneurs, “It takes lot of passion and hard work to scale a business but is an amazingly rewarding experience. You feel like you are growing every day.” Their mantra? “Experiment fast and fail faster: this allows someone to lose least money and pivot quickly. Hire the best team: Do NOT make compromises. It is your team only which can make or break your business.”
Currently FRSH gets about 800 orders per day. Their future plans include scaling up orders to 3000-4000 orders per day, by the end of the year. They also plan to expand to Noida and Bangalore.
FRSH is a healthy food delivery service currently operating in Gurgaon. Their delivery timings are from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm. Do check out their app link and visit their website /facebook page for more information.