Turning laddus into bars: How Usha Shrotriya found entrepreneurship at 62

Till the age of 62, Usha Shrotriya’s world centred around her family and their needs. A homemaker, she enjoyed cooking and painstakingly replicated the recipes passed on from her mother and grandmother, making special delicacies for festivals like Diwali and Shivaratri. 

A graduate, Shrotriya had to let go of her ambitions, many times. Before marriage, she aspired to be a daroga (policewoman), and while her father supported her, her mother felt it was not the right profession for a young girl. Later, she wanted to become a teacher but her family paid no heed to her aspirations.

After marriage, she approached her husband, who was head of a sugar factory in Uttarakhand, with the idea of starting a transport business. However, it was shot down too. Who would look after the family, they asked.

Now, Shrotriya is giving wings to her entrepreneurial dreams. She gave a new twist to the laddus she’d perfected over the years and gave birth to Mama Nourish and her laddu bars. 

Turning laddus into bars

While visiting her son Yash Parashar in Mumbai in 2021, she made the special Gond laddus for her daughter-in-law Apurva who had just delivered a baby. (Gond laddus are usually made from ghee, wheat flour, edible gum, jaggery and dry fruits are given to a woman after she has delivered a child.)

“When I had to visit my daughter in Noida, the Gond laddus ran out. She did not know how to make the laddus and realised that some recipes may not pass from one generation to the next and discussed this with me and Yash over a call,” Shrotriya recalls in a conversation with HerStory.

Also, when her daughter was pregnant, she was diagnosed with gestational diabetes, and so making laddus with sugar was out of the question.

“I made laddus with dates and dry fruits for her and everyone liked them. We started discussing how to make these laddus and store them. I noticed that Apurva was packing cereal bars for Yash every day. I thought that these healthy laddus would be a better option and started fashioning them into bars,” she says.

Shrotriya was both determined and adamant about turning laddus into a laddu bar. She worked for days on end to get the right proportions and hit success after around 90 trials.

Parashar, an NIT and IIM graduate with a flourishing career at Tata Motors, would watch his mother’s efforts in fascination and awe. She tried different ingredients—moong dal, urad dal and bajra, eliminated sugar, added dates and dry fruits, cut down on the ghee to the minimum and continued experimenting. 

Last year, when the bar finally took shape, Parashar took it to the office where his colleagues loved it. Intrigued by the interest, he discussed it with his friend and college mate Kunal Goel and the two surveyed 250 people across major cities to assess the demand for healthy traditional food alternatives among urban families with dual incomes.

“Most of the people in the survey said that there was no trusted brand for traditional recipes; they only trusted their mothers,” says Parashar. They spoke to food technologists to understand how these laddus could withstand the “bar” test and be produced at scale. This exercise took them around six months and in October last year, they were able to crack the right recipe.

Parashar and Kunal decided to plunge into the laddu bar business full-time and the Mama Nourish brand started delivering to customers in January 2024.

Recipes from grandmothers

Shrotriya did not want to restrict Mama Nourish's laddu bars to just her recipes, including Gond laddu. She reached out to two women who were experts at making laddus. 

One was a former neighbour, Saroj Madan, who made kamarkas (a herb) laddus and happily shared the 1,500-year-old recipe. Also included in Mama Nourish's range of laddu bars is the methi laddu by Suman Dhamane aka Aapli Aaji, a 70-year-old grandmother from Ahmednagar, Maharashtra who is also a YouTube star. 

Mama Nourish offers a total of 12 SKUs.

Parashar and Goel decided to sell the laddu bars on their own website before moving to the Amazon marketplace.

Using performance marketing tools on Facebook and Google, they struck success with an enquiry from Netflix within just a month of the launch, which led to its first corporate order. They were introduced to Meta through an employee and tapped a distributor to receive orders.  They also listed the Mama Nourish laddu bars on Amazon.

“People in different offices began telling us to make them available on vending machines. Following a pilot, we are now available in vending machines in four airports—Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, and Hyderabad, and in 150 corporate offices across India,” Parashar says.

While Mama Nourish owns the recipes, its manufacturing is outsourced to an FSSAI- and FDA-certified third-party facility, with Shrotriya monitoring quality checks at every stage. 

Following feedback, the brand has also introduced the Mini Laddubar - a bite-sized bar to fulfil sweet cravings after meals. The price points for the bigger bar starts at Rs 70 and the mini bar is priced at Rs 40.

Initially bootstrapped, Mama Nourish has now received funding from angel investors. Parashar says it’s too early to talk about profitability and is optimistic about the brand’s future.

“We have been given a great purpose–to take the recipes of grandmothers forward so that our children can know and enjoy them. We will be looking at more such recipes and see a huge potential in international markets,” he adds.