This Mom’s passion for healthy eating inspired her to start Kalchi that offers healthy, quick Indian meal options
Being a working professional and a mother of 2 young children, what to put in the lunch and snack box was a daily dilemma for Payal Asthana Srivastava, Co-founder & Director, Kalchi . Preparing 3-4 meals in a day becomes a challenge with life getting increasingly busy. Looking around, and after talking to friends she realized, it’s a major problem with everyone considering the busy schedules most parents have, these days.
Everyone was looking for some healthy, convenient food options that excite our natural taste buds. Unfortunately, no FMCG brand till now has addressed this pain point. And that’s where Kalchi comes in, to fill the gap. Kalchi offers convenience to lives of consumers who love Indian food but are unable to put in the effort due to various reasons. Kalchi beautifully marries maximum taste with minimum effort and puts on the table a product that can be consumed on an everyday basis. All the products are free from artificial preservatives, flavours, colours and additives.
Payal’s Journey as an Entrepreneur
Payal is a civil Engineer and post graduate in HR. She worked in the industry for 10 years of industry before turning into an entrepreneur 4 years back. Prior to Kalchi, she had a sports startup and were conducting archery training programmes at centres of Decathlon all across West and South India. It was then opportunity of setting up health café at Decthalon corporate office cum store in Bangalore came up and Payal alongwith her husband and colleague started Kalchi.
She started by setting up a test lab at her home kitchen and began trials along with a hired experienced chef. The team’s belief was strengthened when they did a pilot by offering the products to people living in her residential community. The acceptance & response was phenomenal as they came back with future orders.
Currently Kalchi is present in more than 50 premium and mid-market outlets in Bangalore and are planning to expand to Mysore by July 2018, Mumbai and Pune by September 2018, Hyderabad by November 2018 and Delhi/ NCR by March 2019. Apart from the existing range of Ready- to- eat curry spreads, Heat- and- Eat cutlets, and Ready- to- cook marinated chicken, they are developing new products in exciting flavours in existing and new categories.
With the rising popularity of Indian delicacies globally, they are getting many International enquiries from markets such as US/ UK/ Canada & Middle East, and we are evaluating the same.
Challenges faced by Payal
“Few challenges that I faced while starting-up were raising right amount of capital and communicating the value behind the Brand philosophy. However, because of the strength in the founding team and the innovative products we created, we have been able to manage these challenges quite well till now.”- says Payal
Payal’s Message to the Fellow Mompreneurs
My advice for an entrepreneur is to be extremely passionate about the things that you want to achieve, have an immovable faith in yourself, and be ready to persevere as success will take its own time but will definitely be worth it.
To Connect with her venture: Kalchi
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