How to perfect the idli and vada batter

PC Musthafa has five simple mantras for start-up founders to follow, based purely on his experiences as an entrepreneur.

His mantras are: do no wait for 100 per cent knowledge, go ahead, make mistakes and learn from them; do not compromise and look for shortcuts; have the courage to take tough decisions; earn your customers’ trust; and, use your common sense.

The founder and CEO of iD Fresh Food, which started off making idli and dosa batter, held the audience’s attention at TiECON 2018 here on Saturday when he narrated his story and the lessons he had learnt. Born in a village in Wayanad in Kerala, Musthafa, whose father was a daily wage earner, recalled he had to walk a long distance to go to school and the only motivation to do so was the government’s mid-day meal scheme.

He was a poor student and dropped out of school. He later rejoined school, finished it, studied engineering at NIT Kozhikode, worked for a few multinational companies, obtained an MBA from IIMB and decided to start to start his own venture with his cousins. The rest, as the cliche goes, is history.

Founded in 2005 in Bengaluru, iD Fresh Food is now a ₹1,000-crore brand, according to him. It has so far raised ₹185 crore from investors such as Helion Ventures and Premji Invest, in two rounds of funding. It hopes to end this year with about ₹250 crore turnover and reach sales of ₹1,000 crore in the next 3-4 years. iD has eight kitchens now and sells batter in Bengaluru, Chennai, Tiruchi, Coimbatore, Mysuru, Kochi, Hyderabad, Vijayawada, Visakhapatnam, Mumbai, Pune and the UAE. It is looking for the right distribution partners to launch the product in the UK and the US.

The company recently launched single origin filter coffee decoction, the response to which has been quite good and encouraging, according to Musthafa. Its other products include Malabar Parota, vada batter, whole wheat parota, natural panneer and natural curd.

According to Musthafa, iD makes and sells about 60,000 kg of batter every day; that is, the equivalent of 1.3 million idlis a day.

Learnt from mistakes

He was a software engineer and his cousins were running a kirana shop in Bengaluru. None of them knew anything about food technology or the food business. After they had started selling idli and dosa batter, they got a call from a retail shop in Bengaluru saying the batter had caused an explosion. They could not believe what they heard, but then one of Musthafa’s cousins went to the shop, where the shopowner wanted his refrigerator to be cleaned of the mess caused by the batter exploding. Even as Musthafa’s cousin was explaining to the shopowner how good the batter was, the pack “exploded” spraying batter all over.

Musthafa told the audience that they did not know that batter ferments and fermentation caused gas to form, which led to the explosion. He said he and his cousins learnt from this mistake and never again had the problem.

The company launched its batter in Chennai in 2009. It was confident about its brand, but found its competitor was selling batter at about ₹10/kg, whereas iD’s batter cost ₹50. He said iD decided not to compromise on the quality of the rice it used in its batter and very soon found it difficult to pay salaries to its employees. Rather than compromise on quality and take short cuts, he said the company decided to shut down its Chennai plant, sold the machinery, paid off its employees and focussed on profitability of its Bengaluru operations.

‘Trust shops’

As a means of earning its customers’ trust, iD decided to open “trust shops” – it has 35 of these now in apartment buildings and office complexes – where its products are placed in a refrigerator. There is no one manning these and customers can walk up to the fridge, pick up a product, pay for it by dropping the money in a box kept nearby and walk away.

At one particular such trust shop, one particular customer kept dropping money used in the game of “Monopoly”. The company did nothing about it, but kept replenishing the stock. One fine day, the customer dropped a ₹500 note in the box instead of paying by his “Monopoly” currency. “That made my day,” Musthafa said and added, trust your customers, so that they will trust you.

On using one’s common sense, he said idli batter was no rocket science. The founders were only following recipes handed down by grandmothers. What iD’s founders did was to go and talk to the Tamil-speaking roadside eatery owners in Bengaluru to find out how they prepared their batter. They translated this knowledge into their business and got the batter. “The biggest innovations are inspired by common sense,” he said.

Likewise, when they introduced vada batter, they worked on the pouch and the spout so that crispy vadas with the perfect hole could be made by anyone. “It takes one minute to make vada at home now, but it took us three years to build it. Vada making is a science now, no longer an art,” Musthafa added.

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