We bring to you this week’s startup story Kitchen D’lite – Founded by Anubhav Bhatnagar – An XLRI alumnus.
Before we read more about kitchen D’lite, let’s know a little bit about Anubhav’s background and his inspirational journey as an entrepreneur so far!
Anubhav is a first-generation entrepreneur with 6+ years of experience in Business Development. Like every other freshly graduated IT engineer, he started his career as a Software Engineer with Virtusa Consultancy Services Pvt Ltd. But that never gave him any satisfaction. With the “fire in the belly” to do something of his own and the curiosity to learn about business, he started selling Lassi part-time.
That gave him great insights about building a market-ready product, deciding the pricing points, go-to-market strategy and challenges faced in building a start-up. With learnings from his lassi shop, he started his new venture Sweetfrost.in with his friend that dealt in online delivery of cakes and gifts in Hyderabad and in 6 months of time expanded his venture to cities of Bhopal, Delhi, Noida, Gurgaon and Indore. Realizing that scalability and profitability was an issue and both the partners being involved only part-time, he moved out of this to start something full-time.
Being the experimental entrepreneur that he was, he ventured into SMSGrid.com that provided Bulk SMS and Digital Marketing services to customers. The start-up was growing aggressively, but the fall-out between the partners made his exit. With little savings that he was left with, he started Kitchen D’lite in the summer of May 2018, and there has been no looking back ever since.
Excerpts from our exclusive interview with Anubhav:
Tell our audience more about Kitchen D’lite, how it works and what products are currently available in the market?
Kitchen D’lite is a Hyderabad based start-up that is into the food processing sector. We deal in dehydrated vegetable powders and blends. Our products are made using fresh vegetables while making sure that all the goodness of fresh vegetables remains intact.
These products can be used in everyday cooking as a direct replacement for fresh vegetables.
How to use Kitchen D’lite vegetable powders?
Bake into breads and vegetables
Blend into sauces, green juices and smoothies
Shake them into vegetable juices and salad dressings
Stir into dips, soups, sauces, curries, gravies, casseroles and stews
We also have 2 blends in our product catalogue and we are consistently working towards launching many more.
Kolkata Jhal Muri (Murmura/Puffed Rice) Masala
Jhal Muri is a staple snack in the eastern part of the country, specifically in West Bengal. It’s murmura/puffed rice with chopped onions, green chillies, coriander leaves, coconut, peanuts mixed in a very small quantity of mustard oil and blended with the goodness of spices which makes it a very tasty and healthy snack. We have come up with this authentic blend straight from our kitchen to make this snack a national habit.
Lemon Tea Masala
This blend was launched with the idea to give that instant energy boost and freshness to your body and mind. All you have to do is add a teaspoon of this masala to your freshly brewed tea (sugar/honey optional) and your tangy, salty lemon tea is ready to give you that instant dose of evergy.
Where did the idea of Kitchen D’lite come from? Give us some background.
The idea for Kitchen D’lite got initiated right from my kitchen. I love cooking and often cook at home. One such day I was making lunch for me and my wife, I was preparing a curry which required a good quantity of onions and garlic. Now while onions and garlic add a lot of flavor to the curries and like a lot of homes, these are the two staple ingredients in my kitchen; but the process of chopping onions and peeling garlic is not a very pleasant experience. I have always hated chopping onions and peeling garlic in any recipe as onions make me cry and peeling garlic leaves a pungent smell on my hands. Needless to say that both are a time-consuming process. Now I wanted to understand if this was just my problem or others also had the same thoughts.
My wife was the first person with whom I discussed this. To my surprise, she immediately related to this as being one of the most painful and time-consuming experiences in her cooking time. I also shared this with my mother, mother-in-law, and a couple of close friends who cook and also of the them had similar thoughts.
I quickly started googling about what the various solutions could be. I found that there were many garlic paste and onion paste brands available in the market but all of them were using preservatives for a longer shelf life. I was not in the favor of using any of these products as they were full of preservatives. And I was convinced that with the growing awareness towards healthy eating and living, many others out there would also not be in the favor of using products that had preservatives.
I started asking myself if I can make a product which has no preservatives and can have a longer shelf life without tampering the real essence of the natural product while solving my purpose of not having to chop onions and peel garlic every time I have to cook. It was in this process of researching the possibilities of building such a product, I read a couple of journals on food processing. That is when I got to know about dehydration of food products and their innumerable benefits. I was amused and excited by my findings.
I tried making my first product in my kitchen using my microwave oven. Failed multiple times, burnt a lot of onions and garlic to finally reaching my desired product. I tried using dehydrated onion and garlic in my curries to understand the difference (good or bad) it brought to my recipes. I was excited to find out that my curries even tasted better and just a spoonful of these powders was enough to bring that natural flavour. Not only did I not have to chop onions and garlic, but these powders did not require any roasting as well since they were dehydrated and hence, in concentrated form. My cooking time almost reduced to half!
I sent these home-made samples to my parents, in-laws and friends to get the feedback. I got a very positive feedback from most of them and thus, began my journey of Kitchen D’lite, starting with Red Onion Powder and Garlic Powder.
What challenges/obstacles did you face in your journey so far?
With our product category of dehydrated vegetable powders being relatively new in the market, the major challenge that we faced was educating the prospective customers about the benefits of our products. The most common things that we heard from them were, “Why would I go for these powders when I can buy fresh vegetables from the market”, “I prefer using fresh rather than these powders”, “My cook will not be interested in using such products”. Most of them would not understand how to use these products, some would find it difficult to believe that in spite of not having any preservatives it has a long shelf life of 12 to 18 months.
With such kind of queries and concerns coming our way, we realized that Facebook and Instagram Ads or even Google Adwords would not work for us because there was a major lack of awareness in the market regarding these products. We also realized that our products needed some level of hand-holding where we educate the customers’ first-hand about the usability of the products and that is how we started exhibiting our products in B2C exhibitions where we would interact with our customers talking about our products. We would also make the samples available for them to taste and smell. This gave them some confidence to try them out.
Now the problem with B2C exhibitions was that it would allow us to reach a very limited number of people. We wanted to expand our reach and that is how we tried Influential Marketing, which worked wonders for us. Another thing that we were sure about was that we did not want any paid feedback. We were looking for food bloggers and home chefs who would try our products in their everyday recipes and give us genuine feedback, whether good or bad. We wanted to take that risk, also because we were confident about the quality of our products and we use them in our kitchen. A lot of research went in picking the right influencers. We were not looking for the number of followers they had, rather we were more focused on the quality of their content and that they would be willing to do this without any commercials involved.
What is one strategy that you believe has helped grow Kitchen D’lite?
Influential marketing has worked well for us since Day 1 of our launch. We would send our products to food bloggers and home chefs to try different recipes using them and they would genuinely find them useful. Their confidence in our products showed across in their feedback to their followers which gave us a lot of credibility.
We also realized that gradually our brand became known by word of mouth. And we started receiving some 10 per cent of our orders organically. We have never compromised on the quality of our products and our packaging and that showed in the positive feedback that we were receiving from our customers. What has also worked for us is the 12-18 months of shelf life that our products have and that too without any preservatives, and this is something that the customers really appreciated.
This helped us a lot in attracting and retaining our customers, and it gives me immense pride to mention that today almost 30 per cent of our orders come from repeat customers.
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