“Eat like your grandmother; organic when possible”
SHAURAVI MALIK AND MEGHANA NARAYAN 36 & 40, Co-founders, Slurrp Farm, Delhi
They have an aversion to the term ‘mompreneur’. Where are the dadpreneurs, they ask. Shauravi Malik and Meghana Narayan, two women behind the popular children’s food brand Slurrp Farm shifted streams from successful careers at McKinsey and Richard Branson’s family holding company in London to make children in India eat healthier, returning to traditional grains such as millets. “The idea initially hit us when we were working in London. Every time we would visit India, our friends with children would ask us for certain food products for their children. This request took us by surprise. We simply couldn’t believe that people would want to import food to India. We have such tremendous variety and diversity in our traditional way of eating, we just couldn’t understand it,” says Narayan. Coupled with extensive reading on food and supply chains and the documentary Food Inc, the two knew they had to do something to bridge the gap in healthy eating options in the children’s food market. Having children of their own added further to their awareness and the lack of nutritious food options was a reality they couldn’t ignore.
“The contamination at every level has frightening repercussions on societal health outcomes. 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,” says Malik. The belief that packaged food for children needs to have the same benefits it does when made at home led them to delve deeper into research and formulations.