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My Journey to becoming a Foodpreneur

My Journey to becoming a Foodpreneur

Saturday January 13, 2018,

4 min Read

Who doesn’t love food, but spending hour to make a delicious dinner isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. I was no different. To me cooking was only limited to my mother and grand-mother. I was never forced, nor that was I interested in cooking.

Today, is a complete shift of paradigm. I now teach healthy baking to kids and adults alike via my workshop. I travel across India and conduct my workshops on healthy baking.

I am pledged to convert homemakers into homebakers

Born in a small town of Punjab known as Barnala, I am Masters in Maths. Alright, born in Punjab doesn’t really mean born foodie. 

I started my career as a Science and Math teacher but in the hunt of ultimate harmony with my mind, I kept learning new things and changed job quite many times. Food was nowhere in my thoughts.

It was after my marriage in 2006 and after I was blessed with a baby boy in 2007, the need of learning cooking became a necessity. Till this time, I was struggling in a dual role. I was mother, a wife and a working women. Food was thus far a low priority task.

My life took a steep turn in 2009 when I moved to the US along with my husband as he was on his assignment.

This was the time, when I was just talking to myself and my kid. I wasn’t working at this time. I realized that sitting idle was a never ending task and there is nothing worse than sitting idle forcefully. But the free time gave me time to rejuvenate and talk to myself.

I was seeking for the ultimate harmony with my mind 

but guess what, I was nowhere close to it.

After I came back to India, I tried many things, was successful in almost all of them. But the mind was still seeking for harmony. Nothing could hold me for long.

End of 2014, we all moved to Pune, again my husband’s assignment. New city, no friends, no job and I was forced to sit idle at home once again. But this time something different happened. I will credit it to air of Pune. The baking bug hit me and I started loving it. Since then, I have never looked back.

I spent hours and hours on watching various food shows, spent endless hours on internet reading about baking and its science. Read multiple books, became part of 1000’s of FB groups and interacted with a lot of people and collected knowledge.

Finally, I collected all my courage and started experimenting. My husband and my kid were my lab rats. Initial few months were disastrous, just too many failures. But I had enough encouragement coming my way from my husband and my little one that faded the sorrow of failures and motivated me for my next experiment. And the journey never stopped.

I started Sonlicious in 2016. The idea was to introduce healthy baking to the world. I wanted to reach out to people and tell them the harm we have been doing to our body by eating market bought baked items. Your breads, pizzas, sandwich, muffins, cakes, they all have preservatives and additives in it. There are a variety of chemicals and low quality ingredients that goes in our stomach and we just don’t realize that.

I wanted a platform where I could share my learnings with people in the form of recipe and hence the blog. Today I spread awareness through my

Blog

YouTube

Facebook Group

Hands-on Workshop

I am now independent and work only for myself. No more 9-5 job. Yes, it took me time to find harmony with my mind, but now I feel joyful in every bit of what I do.

In the year 2017 I have trained 105 people on healthy baking. 2018, I have doubled the challenge for myself. I will be travelling more, conducting more workshop and help people start baking healthy at home. Along with this, I am also in conversation with an NGO to find possibilities of teaching this skill to the children there. 

I invite folks with similar interest and vision to join me in my mission.

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