Why Meghana Narayan of Slurrp Farm is going towards the grain

Slurrp Farm came to fruition when the two mothers to young children saw a gap in the market—healthy snacks for children that could be organised in a jiffy. Narayan, one of India’s leading swimmers in the 1990s, had always led a healthy life and felt that there should be more options for working parents.

“There was a way to deliver better nutrition with traditional methods as opposed to adding vitamins and minerals, right? So how do we get ragi to do the magic, make it interesting and yummy, getting that taste-price-nutrition value right. We felt there is a large company to be built here," says the 47-year-old Narayan. “The vision was to be India’s most loved children’s food brand."

At the Indian restaurant Masala Bay in Taj Land’s End, where we are meeting, Gurugram-based Narayan shows no signs of fatigue, having travelled to Mumbai that morning for a conference. She speaks with infectious, excitable enthusiasm as someone who is able to function in fourth gear all the time. April’s heat in Mumbai kills appetites, so we settle for a soup each. It’s early on a weekday at Masala Bay, which has just started service, and we are the only ones in the restaurant for the longest time.

Born in Pune, where her father worked for a telecom company, Narayan moved to Bengaluru around age nine when her father switched jobs. She sees herself as a “Bangalorean", because she grew up there, found her love for swimming, and because that city 30 years ago made you feel like you wanted to belong.

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Bengaluru in the 1990s was a swimming powerhouse, producing an assembly line of champions, especially women. Narayan was one of them, besides close friends Nisha Millet, Sajani Shetty and Ashima Shetty. She chose her school (Sacred Heart Girls High School) and college (University of Visvesvaraya College of Engineering) additionally for their proximity to the K.C. Reddy Swim Centre (or KCR). Powered by coach Nihar Ameen at KCR, she balanced academic expectations from her parents with a swimming career that took her to the Asian Games in 1998, made her part of the Indian team for the better part of the 1990s and won a clutch of medals in her favoured butterfly stroke over longer distances.

Narayan believes—in hindsight—that swimming shaped everything she has done in her life, the way she is and the way she approaches every problem, pointing to her focused “persistence on doing everything a little bit better every day and just not giving up".

“My daughter would say, ‘mama, you won 400 gold medals. I say, yes, but that means I lost so many more in more than a decade."

In her last year of computer science engineering, while Ameen goaded her towards the Olympics (Millet went to Sydney in 2000), she felt it was time to move on. She credits coaches like Ameen and Pradeep Kumar for honing that swimming culture in the city and providing athletes with an enduring legacy. “All of us have had awesome lives because of it. Also, the mothers (like her own, Raji) were the A-stars there because they did all the work. When you become a mum yourself, you’re a little bit like, oh, that’s (children) a lot of work," says Narayan, whose 12-year-old daughter is a budding horse rider.

On an uncle’s suggestion, Narayan applied for—and got—a Rhodes scholarship, picked math and computation at Oriel College in Oxford starting 2000, swam against Cambridge and met her future husband Arunabha Ghosh, now the founder-CEO of the think tank Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW).

Bengaluru was at the time home to Infosys, a burgeoning software industry and turning itself from a pretty, leafy town into a megapolis. It felt like Narayan would fit right into this ecosystem. “But sometimes, when you open many doors, you’re confused. I ended up thinking, I no longer want to be a coder at, say, Microsoft." She spent a decade consulting with McKinsey & Co., in Delhi, Mumbai, the US and the UK with two years in between at Harvard Business School (HBS) for an MBA.

A colleague at McKinsey, Utsav Baijal, introduced her to her co-founder Malik, assuming that they would get along “at least because both were south Indian", Narayan remembers with a laugh. The introduction was predestined as the two got along like a house on fire and discovered a common love for food and music in London. They ended up working together, later, while Baijal, now a partner at Apollo Global Management, became an early investor in Wholsum.

“I clearly married the same person twice," says Narayan, laughing, about Malik. “She irritates me like how my husband does. But I could not have danced without her. Someone said this about us, ‘even if this thing is failing, you will not give up. You will not know when to quit’. That might be something that we both share."

“She’s the smarter one, the longer-term thinker. Whenever the problem is a bit more complex, requires deeper thought, I’ll chuck it her way," says Narayan, who manages operations, sales, product and fund-raises while Malik handles day-to-day finance, marketing and people.

Narayan’s daughter’s birth in 2012 contributed to the idea of Slurrp Farm. The venture was driven by personal need, because Narayan went back to work when her daughter was a few months old, and she could not find any healthy eating options for the child. In a traditional Indian fashion, she called her mother—and grandmother—who got busy sprouting, roasting, grinding ragi and sending it over. Malik, then an investment banker based in the UK, was going through her own crisis at the time, calling her own grandmother.

The duo spent most of 2012-15 reading on the subject and meeting people who ran food businesses, like the makers of Bhuira jams and the late K.C. Raghu of Pristine Organics, who encouraged them to just dive in.

“We had read and studied, been to 160-something factories to try and figure out if we want to make these. We were not making complicated products. Just sprouting, roasting, grinding, re-roasting or baking a cookie, a clean one without any random things that make a cookie shiny," Narayan says. It took from 2015, when she quit her job, to about 2018 to get Slurrp off the ground—a difficult few years. Amazon was the first e-commerce platform that sold their products when they launched with cookies and cereals.

Wholsum Foods began with money from friends and family before Ashish Dhawan, founder of Central Square Foundation, Sanjeev Bikhchandani, founder of Info Edge, who were also customers, joined other angel investors to raise almost ₹6 crore in 2018. Fireside Ventures came in December 2020 with $2 million as the first institutional capital before another $7 million led by Investment Corporation of Dubai.

“The dreams of our 30s were fuelled by the money we made in our 20s," Narayan says. Actor and producer Anushka Sharma, also a mother by then, came on board in March 2022 as an investor and brand ambassador, which helped bring the company into limelight.

“There is a pet food aisle (in a supermarket), but no kids’ food aisle. We’re in that business of creating what is right for children until the age of 10. They eat differently, they eat more meals, need more variety," says Narayan.

“Our expansion is not because of any other reason, it’s not like the colour of lipstick that there has to be a different one. You have to give the mother that portfolio of things to be able to feed her child and that’s what we were trying to solve."

She now has ambitions of taking the brand to the US, inspired in part by the example of quinoa. “There are a lot of American brands (selling quinoa). I was like, that is rubbish, it’s a South American product, there’s got to be some South American brand that owns the narrative. I feel like with millets, we can’t let that go so easily." Their other goal is to reach 100 million people across India—up from the roughly two million they do now.

“The other day somebody said, what are you most proud of? I said our innovation. I can say this with no uncertain terms, feeling no shyness or anything, we are India’s most innovative grain company," Narayan adds.

She gets a lot of calls from people with lifestyle diseases, seeking help. “I feel food really can be medicine, right? You can’t solve everything with food…till you can. There’s a lot to be done in the space, but we are not looking at anything other than going deeper."

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