Meet the woman entrepreneur whose startup 'mushroomed' digitally amid the pandemic

When her son was diagnosed with gluten intolerance, Preeti Rathore began searching for varied healthy options. During her research, she came across medicinal mushrooms like oyster mushrooms, the natural way of growing them, and their health benefits.

An electronics and communications engineer, Preeti was not new to entrepreneurship, having tried her hand at baking customised cakes from home. She decided not to continue with it after her son’s diagnosis and joined her husband’s restaurant business instead.

When the research on mushrooms showed promise, after a five-day certificate course from Sloan HP, she started oyster mushroom cultivation without any harmful chemicals in Jaipur in 2019.

Business that arose from a personal need

After the lockdown, her husband, Manveer Singh Shekhawat, shut down his restaurant and joined her full-time.

“We started Amritatva, an enterprise that is into cultivating, processing, and selling of oyster mushroom as well as value-added vegan and gluten-free mushroom products like mushroom powder, mushroom cookies, chocolates, etc,” she says.

Based in Jaipur, she set up a micro-manufacturing unit at her residence.

“To spread awareness about oyster mushrooms, we added organic vegetables and grocery to the product list to tap more customers and spread awareness about using mushrooms in their daily diet. Our mushroom-based products are vegan and gluten-free, and as we all know, mushroom is also a superfood with high proteins, vitamins, minerals, anti-oxidants, and is low in calories,” she adds.

The products offered by Amritatva focus on oyster mushrooms, and include dried and powdered mushrooms, cookies, seasoning, sattu mix, chocolates, pickles, and badi.

Amritatva is targeting the health-conscious and those with food allergies and nutrition deficiencies like gluten intolerance. With a growing number of people following a vegan diet to stay fit and healthy, its target age group encompasses the 25-70 range.

The global mushroom market was valued at 12.74 million tons (MT) in 2018 and is projected to reach 20.84 million tons (MT) by 2026, exhibiting a CAGR of 6.41 percent in the forecast period.

Gluten-free food market records a revenue of $629 million in 2016 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 10.5 percent during the forecast period (2018-2023). Studies prove that the shopping behavior of 55 percent of the consumers tend to spend 30 percent or more on their grocery budget for gluten-free food. This proves the prominence of inclusion of gluten-free products in food and beverages.

Keeping this in mind, Amritatva plans to export its products soon.

Adopting a digital-first approach

Amritatva sells directly to customers through retail stores, its social media platforms, and its own website www.amritatva.com. It also has a B2B arm that’s tapping into the HORECA and pharma industries.

Before the onset of COVID-19, Amritatva was selling fresh mushrooms, dried mushrooms, mushroom powder, and mushroom pickles with the products in stock.

Preeti explains, “Due to the lockdown, we were not able to sell our products. For three to four months, we faced financial issues, and uncertainty of when we will start working again. Also, markets were closed, Sunday organic markets were shut; we could not visit our farm or reach out to customers.”

The impact of COVID-19 on consumer’s buying behaviour also affected business. Earlier, customers could buy products from shops, but the pandemic led them to look for online options to buy healthy food that would also boost their immunity.

Preeti decided to take a digital-first approach to the way she did business.

“We used social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram extensively. We started sharing knowledge sheets to bring in more awareness regarding the health and nutritional benefits of oyster mushrooms, importance of an organic and vegan diet, among various other related topics. This outreach through social media gave us good exposure, and orders for our oyster mushroom products began trickling in, which in turn helped our enterprise to sustain and grow at a healthy rate,” she says.

Apart from Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, Preeti’s enterprise is quite active on YouTube as well – where she uploads videos mostly related to cooking and recipes with oyster mushrooms and other types of medicinal mushrooms.

Additionally, over the last few months, she has conducted multiple webinars (which she likes to call ‘mushroominars’) and workshops to train several people on mushroom cultivation and consumption; for these workshops, she drove traffic mostly organically through social media handles of her enterprise. 

When it comes to designing posts or editing short videos for social media, Preeti uses free-of-cost simplistic online tools like Canva. Due to the consistent social media outreach, knowledge-giving and comprehensive digital marketing efforts put in by Preeti and her husband, she claims that Amritatva has been able to grow its customer base by 40 percent and potential customer reach by over 200 percent, since the start of the pandemic last year!

“We invested just Rs 900 in May this year on digital marketing and have made revenues of Rs 70,000 for the period between July 2020 and September 2021,” she says.

She is also planning to engage with her target audience and acquire more customers via Instagram and FB Live sessions and by leveraging short videos on Insta Reels and IGTV.

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Creating a social impact

“We also want to create a social impact,” says Preeti, adding, “We train farmers to cultivate organic oyster mushrooms and women to making the mushroom-based products while maintaining industry standards. Our handmade product making process provides employment to many women.”

Last year, Preeti Rathore was a part of Project Her&Now’s Entrepreneurship Support Programme in Rajasthan in 2020, which helped her scale up her business and identify and implement various new ideas related to digital and social media.

‘Her&Now - Empowering Women Entrepreneurs’ is implemented by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), and in partnership with the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE), Government of India. In Rajasthan, the Her&Now Project is running in partnership with Startup Oasis.

Preeti and Manveer have invested Rs 5 lakh from their savings into the business. They introduced the mushroom-based products only in February this year and are looking at a growing client base. They believe their vegan and gluten-free mushroom products make them stand out in the market.

“We are now looking forward to diversify Amritatva’s product line by adding more organic grocery items, medicinal mushrooms like porcini and shiitake mushrooms, and various other mushroom-based home food products such as pasta and soups. We will be also launching a full-fledged ecommerce store soon,” Preeti says.