With beetroot and spinach wheat atta, Desi Atta Company lets you make vegetable parathas in minutes

One day, Ritika Baheti Bajaj and Shridhar Taparia of Desi Atta Company were sitting in their office and thinking about what their colleagues had brought for lunch. They remembered one colleague had started going to the gym, and so he was bringing healthy vegetable parathas for lunch.

"Making these vegetable parathas was a long process, so Ritika asked herself if she could simplify it," says Shridhar. What if there was a way to mix the vegetables with wheat atta before the consumer picked it up from a store? If this happened, all a customer had to do was mix water, knead the dough, and fry the parathas.

The Desi Atta Company, a brand under Future Consumer Limited, had already started selling various atta products and instant mixes since 2015. Ritika, the founding member of Desi Atta Company, had set up the company’s first atta production unit with a focus on a diverse set of ingredients for making the atta.

Thus, looking at the opportunity to simplify vegetable paratha making, she came up with the idea to create two unique vegetable wheat atta mixes- beetroot and spinach. With this wheat atta, one could make a beetroot or spinach paratha in the same way a plain paratha is made. After frying, the beetroot paratha takes a red colour, and the spinach one turns green.

This way, Ritika played an integral role in the early days of the brand, Shridar says. And, after the reins were handed over to Shridhar in 2016, he led Desi Atta Company to scale up from 25 products to over 55 products.

Under Shridhar’s leadership, Desi Atta Company has now positioned these beetroot and spinach attas as one of its USPs. It sells more than one lakh products a week and clocks a turnover of over Rs 24 crore a year. Apart from the healthy vegetable-based attas, it also makes special products that are protein-rich, gluten-free, high fibre, and more.

Customer connect

Shridhar explains some advantages of buying vegetable-infused attas.

“You save a lot of time as the process of making beetroot and spinach parathas is simplified. We do not use preservatives in the products, but we still manage a shelf life of nine months. Regular products last only around three months,” he says.

He believes that kids find the red and green colours interesting, and would also get the benefit of the nutrition contained in the beetroot and spinach.

The process of making these unique vegetable-based wheat attas is a guarded secret Shridhar doesn’t wish to divulge. But one can guess it involves a specific and complex way of blending the vegetable with the atta after they’re both processed.

Desi Atta Company’s products, including the beetroot and spinach wheat attas, are available pan India in Future Group stores such as Big Bazaar, Easy Day, and more.

500 grams of beetroot wheat atta costs Rs 80, and 500 grams of spinach wheat atta costs Rs 65. These are also available on Desi Atta Company’s website as well as on e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and Flipkart.

But the focus is on physical selling and leveraging Future group’s mammoth reach in the retail sector. “We selected this channel to sell after doing controlled launches and analysing the feedback,” Shridhar says, “they are discovery-type products, which means people discover them at stores more often than they specifically search for vegetable-based wheat attas on e-commerce platforms.”

These attas also come in 1 kg packets, and Shridhar believes these smaller sizes allow customers to feel more adventurous. “A lot of the times, customers buy five or six different types of our attas since they are sold in smaller sizes. Since our products are unique, we don’t see customers picking up five or six packets of the same product or one extra large packet.”

Challenges and opportunities

Presently, Desi Atta Company has manufacturing units in Mumbai and Bengaluru. It plans to expand its retail reach and production capabilities by setting up a manufacturing unit in Indore.

“While setting up a facility, we need to ensure that multiple ingredients can be dealt with carefully. We have a wide range of products which require a vast number of processes. Thus, our factories have to have the necessary infrastructure to handle all storage, processing and packaging delicately and accurately,” he says.

To keep its wide range of attas up and running, Desi Atta Company has to deal with over 300 types of raw materials and 37 kinds of flour. “All these ingredients are sourced from various corners of India. We have to constantly travel and source them directly from where they are grown, in order to lower costs,” he explains.

“Future Consumer saw an untapped opportunity in the special flour and flour-based ready mixes branded segment in the Indian market,” Shridhar says. “Traditionally, grains were locally-bought and had to be ground prior to consumption. However, we wanted the consumer to purchase a high-quality product ready for consumption.”

He also notes brands such as Pillsbury and Aashirvaad who were into wheat atta. There were not many options for atta made from other sources, such as ragi and bajra. A company which used these millets had the potential to be unique and become a game-changer.

“My core competency in manufacturing and sales was combined with insights from my Future Group mentors. We quickly became a fast-growing brand and got recognised as the ‘Most Innovative Food Brand’ across the country at the Indian Food Forum,” he says.

The brand now employs more than 30 people in its mission to make a range of attas, including vegetable-based wheat attas, popular across India. Going forward, Shridhar believes that consistency, quality, innovation, and better communication will drive the brand and help it connect better with its customers.

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