According to National Family Health Survey 2018, 1 in 4 urban Indians skips breakfast almost daily, and 3 in 4 Indians eat unhealthy snacks or fast food for lunch at least twice a week. This can increase tiredness and stress at work, and makes it difficult to focus, apart from having long term health effects. For a professional in urban India, there are very few healthy and nutritious meal options. There are some new age restaurants that serve healthy salads. But these salads do not come cheap. The other problem is time. Eating out at a restaurant or the office cafeteria takes anywhere between 30-45 minutes. If you order in, an hour. Cut to the pandemic, and nutritious meal options further shrink for people working from home. Cooks are still not allowed by many RWAs in metros and there are apprehensions around hygiene and sanitation when eating out or ordering in.
An average individual needs about 2200 calories a day with six macro and micro nutrients in a set ratio. While the macro nutrients like carbohydrates, proteins and fats provide energy, micro nutrients vitamins and minerals are necessary for body functions like bone growth, metabolism, building immunity, etc.
Vaibhav Bhandari, the co-founder of Supply6, says that during his MBA in London and professional life after returning to Bangalore, he would constantly find himself strapped for time to fix himself nutritious meals. So much so that he started blending his meals into shakes to be able to have them on the go! That is when he came up with the idea of Supply6 Meal 1.0, “a nutritionally complete and convenient meal in powder format”, as he describes it. “Each single-serve meal sachet contains 20g proteins, 49g carbs, 18g fats and 27 minerals and vitamins, and this constitutes about 20-25% of the daily recommended nutrients required by a healthy individual. All you have to do is add water, mix well and drink while on the move,” he says.
Started in 2019, Supply6 currently has products like 100% Diet Oats and Vegan Protein Shakes for people on Keto diets.
To craft Supply6 meals, Vaibhav got in touch with Bridreth Khokhare, a nutraceutical researcher who worked with companies like Abott and British Biologicals in the past.
After trials, they came up with a blend made from real food ingredients – proteins from peas and rice, carbs from oats, and fat from sunflower seeds. Bridreth has since joined Supply6 as Chief Product Scientist.
Initially incubated at NSRCEL at IIMB, Supply6 has recently been selected for the 2020 Cohort of Silicon Road Food Tech Accelerator.
Starting with the powder format in vanilla flavor, the company plans to launch Supply6 in ready-to-drink and bar formats soon. The CMO, Shambhu Agrawal, says: “Apart from convenient formats, we also want to do a lot of experimentation with taste and texture. In the pipeline, we have different flavor blends to avoid flavor fatigue.”
Their products are available on their website, Amazon, Flipkart and grocery retailers like BigBasket, Grofers and Dunzo. They are also in talks to retail the product in some 200-odd vending machines in tech parks and apartment complexes in Bangalore.
