Why this woman entrepreneur left her Siyaram Group family business to start up on her own

Megha Poddar turning point in life happened after she got married into the Siyaram Poddar Group.

Born and raised in a family that ran its own diamond business, and certified by the Gemological Institute of America, Megha’s dream of joining her father’s business crashed in just one day.

Megha refused an internship offer from Aura, a Tata jewellery brand, because her father was not keen on her working outside. She decided to join her father instead, but a stray comment on her first working day led her to quit.

“An acquaintance of my father had come to the office that day and remarked that it was good that I had joined the business. My father termed it as ‘time pass’ until I got married. I had spent two years learning, and this saddened me,” she recalls.

However, she got married at 20, and life changed completely. Before the wedding, she told her father-in-law that she would like to study further and work. The family had daughters and daughters-in-law working in critical roles in the organisation, so it was a given that Megha could work too.

Like every other family member, Megha’s first role was as secretary to the Managing Director, Ramesh Poddar, for 10 months. Parallelly, she also enrolled for an MBA – a family managed the business programme from SP Jain Institute of Management and Research, Mumbai.

“Working closely with him for 10 months and understanding what was happening in the company, what needed to be looked at, from a business owner’s perspective, and at the same time handling different aspects was exciting,” Megha says.

Turning around a division

After her induction was complete, she could make her own choice of department. At that time, the retail division of Siyaram’s that had been in operation for three years was making huge losses, and plans were afoot to shut down the business. At that time, India was witnessing a retail burst as the mall culture grew.

Megha thought the best way to “test herself and her credibility was to take over the retail division”. She asked for a year to script a turnaround.

In the first week, she fired all professionals working in the division. “I didn’t doubt their knowledge or expertise. It was because I didn’t want to get typecast into their kind of thinking or the negativity they had been facing in the last three years,” she says.

“Within a short period, I was able to bring about straightforward changes and simple solutions, which fortunately worked for us. It took me around two years to stop the losses completely and to bring the business to stability,” she adds.

However, one thing gnawed at her. Even though her in-laws and parents were highly supportive of what she chose to do, she says “women are not the breadwinners of the house”. So, in that sense, there was no expectation of the failed retail department at the time.

Despite this, Megha forged ahead, and in eight years managed around 460-plus exclusive brand outlets for Siyaram’s and other brands.

In 2014, she decided to take a maternity break for three years and planned two children back-to-back so that she could get back to work.

“I had always thought I’d go back to Siyaram and was ghost-managing and working during my break,” she says. As the time to get back came closer, Megha felt she needed to take a leap and figure out if she could do something independently.

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Starting up

She put in her own savings to start Purple Wok, a nationalised Oriental QSR chain under the parent company, White Light Food. Its centralised kitchen was in a monopoly partnership with TJUK, the biggest distributor of FMO products for the HORECA segment in Mumbai.

The pandemic impacted all her plans, and in 25 days, the QSR franchisees sent her a notice that they were shutting down. Soon after, she broke up the partnership with TGUK. After the requisite BMC permissions, she kickstarted White Light Foods as a B2C venture in June 2020 with a simple WhatsApp message.

“We had a stock of our Asian sauces, and I could see everyone around me were into community ordering. I sent a WhatsApp message detailing what was available, and this was the beginning,” she says.

She hired home marketers in Mumbai who used WhatsApp to communicate to people in their societies and nearby ones about White Light Food and its offerings. Starting with ready-to-use cooking sauces, bases, and gravies, 250 kg of stock sold out in the first five days itself.

Megha decided to coordinate the entire exercise for the first four months to bring in a personal touch.

“My phone started to ring at odd hours, and my WhatsApp messages were going berserk. It was a game-changer as it made me understand what customers wanted in terms of value and money,” she adds.

In the first month, they sold 1,000 kg in total, and after interactions with customers, Megha realised what was missing in the Oriental segment were frozen dimsums that people could steam within the comfort of their homes.

The same month, she launched frozen dimsums and started clocking huge volumes. The brand offers 18 varieties of dimsums and 17 sauces at present – all produced, bottled, and packaged in its centralised kitchen facility.

White Light Food’s products are not available on Swiggy or Zomato, only on Amazon. The brand is present in 450 societies in Mumbai and claims to be at No. 4 in the cooking sauces category, especially in the Jain range.

Right now, Megha is looking at rebranding and a change in packaging. “We are also introducing our frozen dimsums in retail stores, and I’m pretty bullish about that. I am also working on highly innovative products related to Parmesan cheese,” she says.