To make authentic South Indian snacks available throughout India, G D Prasad (34) started his own food startup, VS Mani & Co, along with Yashas and Rahul.
Born and raised in Chennai, G D missed his childhood snacks when he moved out of his hometown.
“My North Indian counterparts can easily walk into a store anywhere, and buy a namkeen or aloo bhujia. But the same cannot be said for murukku,” he says, which motivated him to start his own snack brand.
“The company is like a homage to that quaint house on ‘#20, 1st Main Road’ and my grandfather,” he says adding that his grandpa’s name was V Subramaniam, fondly called Mani.
“Everything from the proportion of chicory used in the coffee to the spices used in the snack is done the way my grandparents did. The only difference is that we do it on an industrial scale now,” he says.
The company sells a range of traditional products such as coffee, filter coffee, and snacks such as chilli banana chips, pepper banana chips, ribbon murukku, bitter gourd chips, peanut chikki, and onion vadam.
The products are available on Amazon, Flipkart, Superdaily, and Jio Mart and 200 retail stores in Bengaluru.
The brand also gets orders from cities like Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru, Chennai, the NCR region etc.
The company recently found a spot on the second season of ‘Shark Tank India’ and bagged a deal of Rs 19 lakh for 1% equity and Rs 41 lakh debt at 10% interest.
G D informs that the orders went up 20 times on Amazon the night the episode aired, and they also saw four times more traffic on the website.