Meet This Wholesome Snacker Who Made it to The Entrepreneur India's 35U35 List Through her snacks, how this woman entrepreneur is wooing the palettes of Indian consumers while keeping their fitness goals in mind
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Blenders Pride Reserve Collection presents Entrepreneur's 35U35 list included some path-breaking names from the field of entrepreneurship and 34-year-old Jasmine Kaur made it to the list owing to her venture,The Green Snack Co, which delivers taste in snacks with nutrition.
To compensate for an unthinking, urban lifestyle, the modern consumer often centers his or her diet around the nutritional value of consumer goods and shies away from snacking on high-calorie foods. Owing to the monopoly that fried crisps and sugar-loaded munchies enjoy on the snacking segment, a mindful eater is left with little option to choose from. Jasmine Kaur decided to remedy this situation when she founded The Green Snack Co after facing a lifelong personal struggle with fitness and weight loss. The entrepreneur observed that kale had a ubiquitous presence among diets the world over and designed the company's product portfolio around crunchy and satisfying vegetable kale crisps. Containing no fried oils, preservatives or flavor enhancers, all products feature common superfoods such as ragi, soya, corn and rice.
Relying on experiential marketing, the brand's journey began when Jasmine decided to display, sample and sell kale chips at a food pop-up in Mumbai. Three variants of the product were doing well when the concept finally caught the attention of retailers, gourmet food stores and online critics. A major challenge was educating the end consumer and challenging orthodox beliefs on what is perceived as healthy. "Misinformed health trends are common and often detrimental to the sale of what's actually nutritious. Merely stating scientific facts isn't enough and progressive entrepreneurs must utilize targeted marketing tactics to build entire cultures around ingredients like kale," says Kaur.
The Green Snack Co. has now sold over a million packs in the past 12 months with its major markets being Delhi NCR, Bangalore and Mumbai. In addition to having raised funds in a seed round, Jasmine also plans on raising Series A funding in the near future. Operating on healthy gross margins that are significantly higher than those of most brands in the healthy snacking space, the food producer is stipulated to reach the break even threshold in the next 12 to 13 months. It grew by 400 percent over the previous year and launched new product variants in multiple SKUs that were marketed rigorously across both offline and online trade. In tandem with the growth curve, the company also adopted a self-run distribution network over a master distributor model. Commenting on the brand's futuristic vision, Jasmine opines, "We want to pave an introductory path for new FMCG brands in the still nascent category by introducing lower prices and a more extensive distribution channel across 145 cities Pan India."
She stresses on the need to delegate critical tasks among a well-trained staff in order for her business to grow and aims at fulfilling the obvious gap in the Indian market for mindful, guilt-free snacks.
(This article appears in the February 2019 issue of Entrepreneur Magazine. To subscribe, click here. You can buy our tablet version from Magzter.com. To visit our Archives, click here.)
