Pune Inc. is a firm that encourages healthy eating by disclosing all of the ingredients. True Elements’ traceability function allows customers to track the origins of their items. It just struck a contract farming deal with cooperative organisations in Maharashtra to supply clean grains.
The careful consumer may be found in grocery store aisles, picking up an item and reading the package before making a decision. Since the COVID-19 epidemic began, the number of such shoppers has risen.
According to a December report titled “Impact of COVID-19 on the nutrition choices of urban Indian consumers in 2021” by Euromonitor International and PepsiCo India, nearly 90% of urban consumers were willing to pay more for healthier food options, and 53% of urban consumers were ingredient-conscious when it came to breakfast cereals.
The epidemic has changed people’s attitudes toward food, and the market has responded by flooding stores with “healthy” items, leaving customers perplexed by the many meanings of the term.
True Elements, a breakfast and snack business located in Pune, is now working to tackle the problem. True Elements, one of India’s market leaders in putting clean food on the table, has a traceability feature that allows consumers to trace the antecedents of their product. True Elements had an Annualised Rate of Run (ARR) of Rs. 70 crores in June 2021 and aims to push it up to Rs. 300 crores in 18-24 months. You may find out the route of a product from the farm to the shelf by entering the name of the product and the batch code on the company’s website.
In the coming weeks, a client will be able to learn the name of the farm from which the food was sourced by looking at the farmer’s photo. Because our definition of clean food is absolute, not relative, we believe in total openness. Puru Gupta, co-founder of the firm alongside Shreejith Moolayil, states, “Every item is 100 percent whole grain, zero percent preservative, zero percent additive, and zero percent sugar.”
True Elements engaged in contract farming in Maharashtra and developed agreements with cooperative organisations to get clean grains such as wheat, jowl, flax, and chia directly from farmers.
We did not previously have the scale to go to a farmer and announce that we would buy their full year’s product, but now we do. We have begun to educate farmers on fundamentals such as seed planting. They stand to benefit from increased productivity and profits. “We are also striving to make them technologically capable,” adds Gupta.
Gupta also stated that True Elements currently has 13 product categories, including western and regional breakfast, seeds and their mixes, OTG (on-the-go), RTC (ready-to-cook), RTE (ready-to-eat) snacks, RTD (ready-to-drink) drinks, and 65 products, including gluten-free rolled oats, dark chocolate granola, whole oatmeal, and chocolate pancake mix. The emphasis is on chemical-free, pure food that nevertheless tastes delicious.
A typical consumer falls into one of two categories: the health-conscious individual who finds True Elements goods to be tasty and returns for more; or the taste-conscious consumer who realises after the first bite or sip that they are healthier than most other brands and repeats the purchase. During the epidemic, both sectors rose, which boosted True Elements’ sales.
If we are to develop, we must go mainstream. We reject the term “niche,” which implies “tiny.” We need to go into every nook and cranny of the customer’s kitchen. “We intend to do so while keeping faithful to people, true to our promise, and true to the world,” Gupta explained.
The company has responded to the pandemic’s demands with innovations such as Jowar Cereal Cake—a biscuit-like cake that dissolves and becomes porridge when mixed with milk, with the sweetness coming from sorghum, which is the stem of the jowar plant—and Chocolate Ice cream Indulgence, a dessert mix that is free of chemicals and sugar.
After noticing that individuals were skipping breakfast in their haste to start working from home, True Elements created an oats-almonds-jaggery smoothie. The drink is quick to make and, according to feedback, keeps one satiated until lunch.
“On the Indian cuisine side, there will be five to seven product additions per month in 2022, but we will continue to focus on our bastion of western breakfast.” We are addressing the consumption points of 8 a.m.breakfast, 11 a.m. snack, and 4 p.m. snack time. “A growing number of people are becoming discriminating and feel that they should eat healthily in the morning and evening,” Moolayil adds.
The Delhi High Court instructed the authorities concerned to fully disclose all ingredients that have been used in a food item, not by their code names, but by clearly-mentioned sources, irrespective of the quantity present in the product.