How Rishta Foods built a 2 lakh-strong customer base and other top stories

Entrepreneurship entails taking risks, being persistent, making sacrifices, and never giving up. Some become entrepreneurs by starting their own businesses, while others come up with new ideas for their organisations.

This week on SMBStory, we looked at stories of entrepreneurs who are innovative, creative, determined, and willing to take risks in their pursuit of success. Some have grown their family businesses to greater heights, while others have started from the ground up and made it big in the industry.

Rishta Foods

In 1924, Seth Seetharam Sahuwala founded a small grain mill in Rajasthan. His son, Jagdish Rai, later joined the business and made it more robust. Using the expertise that he gained working with his father, Rai established JRG Food Products Pvt Ltd in 1961.

The Bhubaneswar-based food company was supplying processed oil, flour, and rice. Rai's son, Subhash Chandra, envisioned getting into the consumer division.

He, along with his son Harsh Gupta, founded Rishta in 2000. They researched the market, consumer demands, and existing obstacles before launching the brand. They started Rishta with packed whole wheat atta that served as their primary product till 2015.

In 2015, Gupta added a new vertical to the business and entered the fresh food category with idli-dosa batter and named it . The company is currently serving approximately two lakh people across the country. With other products combined, the company serves around five lakh households.

Rishta has an annual turnover of Rs 100 crore. Out of this, Rs 25 crore comes from the fresh food side of the business, and Rs 75 crore comes from the staple food side.

The company counts ID Fresh Food and MTR Foods as its competitors in the fresh food segment.

Since it is a fermented product, the company focuses a lot on how it is handled, packaged, and transported. Rishta has manufacturing facilities in Ghaziabad, Bhubaneswar, and Bengaluru, with around 200 people working in the fresh foods segment.

Read the full story here.

Other top picks of the week

AG Poly Packs

When cosmetic or pharma bottles are lined up against a shelf, your eyes first meet the outer packaging—the design and even perhaps the shape of the bottle. Chances are if you picked up a product by Patanjali, Mamaearth, Fabindia, or VLCC, you have purchased an AG Poly Packs product too.

When Gaurav Daga left behind a potential career in law to pursue making bottles in 1997, he saw the potential for a large business.

“My cousin told me it was difficult to establish a career in law from scratch. I was thinking of starting a business when I realised there was not much competition at the time in the new-age packaging sector,” he tells SMBStory.

This is when Daga began AG Poly Packs. “We started as distributors of plastic and polymer bottles. These were more affordable, less heavy, and unbreakable,” says Daga.

That bet paid off. Today, it is one of India’s earliest companies to implement a diverse range of packaging for sectors like pharma, beauty, and food, having clocked Rs 158 crore in revenue in FY22.

Today, AG Poly Packs gets about 70% of its business from cosmetics firms, while the rest is split between pharma and food clients.

Read the full story here

SM Toys

When Gaurav Mirchandani enrolled at the University of Georgia in 2005 to pursue a Bachelor's degree in Finance and Marketing, he had no idea that a series of opportunities would eventually bring him back to India, where he would find his true calling—toys.

Mirchandani founded the Indore-based Candytoy Corporate (CTC) in 2019. The company produces plastic promotional toys under the brand name SM Toys.

CTC has three factories with over 250 machines and a daily production capacity of 10.2 million toys. It had a turnover of Rs 125 crore in FY22 and expects to close the current fiscal year with a turnover of Rs 200 crore.

Under SM Toys, CTC collaborates with snack companies to create promotional toys. It also partners with other brands that are looking to attract youth. Its clients span across sectors from airlines Vistara and AirAsia to shoe brands such as Action and Puma.

It has also partnered with companies such as MTR, and Bournvita. For Colgate, SM Toys created sand timers to encourage kids to brush their teeth for two minutes.

Read the full story here