How We Turned My Grandma’s Recipes into a Successful Biz of Healthy Snacks for Kids

Shrey Arora is a big time foodie. Reminiscing childhood memories of savouring aam papad and imli candies, he would search for brands that sell healthy instant food and snacks. But the dig would always be fruitless.

During a visit to his wife Urvashi Srivastava’s ancestral home in Lucknow, Shrey got to taste traditional snacks made by her nani — from tangy aam papad (mango bars), imli (tamarind) candy to munchies made of chana sattu (gram flour).

The Lucknow trip proved serendipitous for Shrey who, by then, was looking for a food startup idea.

Realising the need for healthy snacks in the market, Shrey along with his wife co-founded Trick or Treat Foods. With its tagline ‘No Tricks, Only Tasty Treats’, the company aims to provide healthy snacking options, especially to kids.

The venture provides chemical-free snacks with no refined sugar, preservatives, sulphites, colours or artificial flavours. “We only use quality, chemical-free fruits, jaggery and spices in our products. We use lemon juice as a preservative in candy roll-ups to provide a shelf-life of up to seven months,” Shrey, an MBA graduate and CEO of the Ghaziabad-based venture, tells The Better India.

The brand offers a fruit roll-up available in six flavours — mango, kacha aam, pineapple, strawberry, pink guava, and imli. Apart from the fruit roll-ups, the brand has introduced coco energy bars whose main ingredient is chana sattu.

Sustaining grandma’s recipes

The venture, which was incorporated in February 2022, kicked off in the hopes that they could sustain on Urvashi’s family’s traditional recipes. 

“My nani is the rock of our startup. She was so happy when she came to know that we are starting a company that sells her snacks. Her recipes were followed completely. However, small changes were to be made as those products can’t last long at room temperature. We took help from a food consultant to modify the recipes without changing them,” says Urvashi, an engineering graduate and in-charge of the company’s design department.

As per the co-founders, the fruits used in the making are directly sourced from farmers in South India. “Only export-quality fruits are selected to ensure quality and consistency.” The frozen pulp of these fruits, stored at -18 degrees Celsius, is used in the making of candies.

The company has nearly 16 full-time employees, who engage in lab activities, processing and dispatching the products.

The products are available for purchase from the company’s website, social media pages, Amazon or Indiamart. They are also found in certain retail stores around metro cities Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Delhi. 

While the protein bars have become best-sellers, mango and strawberry flavours are their buyer’s favourites.

The venture has recently included six new products — fruit and nut coco bars, coconut crush coco bars, choco chip brownie coco bars, honey trail mix coco bars, coffee tiramisu coco bars, crunchy peanut choco bars.  

If you are interested in starting a business like this, learn all about it from the co-founder Urvashi herself. In this video, she shares their business secrets, the do’s and don’ts of starting a venture, and their biggest mantra for becoming a successful entrepreneur.

Edited by Divya Sethu.