Crunchy millet chikkis power Raju Bhupathi into a multi-crore business

The idiom ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket’ does not apply to Raju Bhupathi. With a desire to innovate, the founder of the Hyderabad-based company, M for Millets, chucked up a successful IT career and invested all his money in the food business. Though he went broke after that, he persevered and bounced back stronger, creating new opportunities for himself. When we meet at his factory at Devaryamjal, around 19 kilometres from the Secunderabad railway station, Raju is busy preparing for the launch of a fully automated second factory, adjacent to the first one.

Determined to succeed

Dressed in a black tee and grey trousers, Raju’s casual attire and demeanour (“I am working for myself”) hide his capacity to take risks, perseverance and determination to succeed. With the support of his wife Padma, he launched M for Millets in 2018 — the National Year of Millets in India — with Troo Good chikki, their star product.

What does a chikki have to do with millets, you may wonder. The traditional peanut-jaggery treat incorporated crispy jowar (sorghum) pops blended with a bit of glucose syrup (within permissible limits). The ₹5 Troo Good chikki in its 15 gram and 20-gram variants (a 30-gram variant will be launched soon) slowly made inroads into the market.

In its six-year journey, the company has launched other ancillary products – peanut and coconut chikki, millet pops (crispies), millet sticks, and jowar ribbons, but the millet-enriched chikki continues to be its flagship brand sold at 25,000 stores across India, particularly at Telangana and Andhra Pradesh residential schools and canteens of corporate offices.

Apart from the two factories in Hyderabad, the company has two factories each in Rajahmundry (Andhra Pradesh) and Chattisgarh, altogether manufacturing a whopping 2 million chikkis/bars every day.

The company sources jaggery blocks only from Mandya in Karnataka for its consistency in colour and texture. “See, jaggery has quite a few variables; One of them being the season; like, winter jaggery is different from summer jaggery and from the rainy season too. And the water and salinity of the soil also matters for the jaggery.

Reflecting on his passion for entrepreneurship, Raju says he could have become a businessman in his 20s. “I lost my father when I was young and didn’t have direction in life; one has many hidden interests but we need a bit of a push; else we keep accepting whatever life brings.”

Raju’s success has not come easy. His initial foray into the food industry began in 2014 with Hello Curry, a cloud kitchen that he had to sell off due to losses. The experience, however, taught him that his vision was packed with too many ideas that it flopped. That also paved the way for Troo Good. “I want to play with just a few ingredients; we master them so that they become our DNA and we build on it. We realised it a little late, but for our good,” he says.

Nutrition, taste and affordability were all considered carefully when selecting ingredients for the chikki that would appeal to the Indian mindset? He says: “We don’t want to go back and connect the dots, create a sentiment or piggyback on emotions. We don’t talk about anything; we just let our product speak.”

Marketing approach

Adapting low-key advertising is deliberate, he says and explains, “If we advertise in the product phase, customers will see it, but there is no guarantee they will eat it too. Even when the product is superior, the sales graph does not rise consistently. One needs to be cautious when spending on marketing.”

Tech to help

Automation played a significant role in the company’s growth. Raju uses his IT background to build in-house technology, the research and development, quality assurance and procurement teams are centralised and factories follow the same blueprint. With food adulteration cases rising, what safety standards do they maintain?

“The quality can vary widely due to processing, and external factors such as storage and weather. The company implements new technology to process the grains and have automated stuff for internal quality checks. “Sometimes, cross contamination may happen due to the weather, which is not in our hands, but what makes us unique are our efforts to ensure the product remains stable even when shipped to places with extreme weathers,” he says referring to traceability (QR codes at the distributor level to scan the code to report the product’s expiry) and dashboards (to see the store universe and understand ‘thoroughput’ and repeat ratio measuring the effectiveness of production and performance).

Transitioning from an employee to entrepreneur in an unknown industry is a testament to his resolve. “Manoeuvring the day-to-day challenges to become what we are now is a great effort. Unless one is that passionate and driven, one could just walk out even for small issues.” His goals set for the next two years: To create a chikki with a universal appeal, opening a million stores across India, export to foreign countries and innovate for the product to endure weather changes.