Easy eat: serving up that quick bite

The next time you order a hot meal of rava upma or kadhi chawal on an IndiGo flight or a pongal on an Air Costa flight, thank 73-year-old Radha Daga, whose enterprise has made it possible for you to have your meal.

All that it takes for the hostess in the flight to get your meal ready is eight minutes and a flask of hot water.

The hostess has to just cut open the packet containing the de-hydrated upma or chawal or pongal , empty it into a plastic tub, pour hot water up to the marked line and close the tub. After eight minutes, your food is ready to eat.

On an IndiGo flight, your upma will come under the brand name Magic Upma, but if you were to buy it in a retail outlet, it will bear the label Eze Eats, which is the brand under which Daga’s venture Triguni Food Pvt Ltd sells its ready-to-eat foodstuff.

For this housewife-turned-entrepreneur, the food business is her second venture; the first was a garment business that started off doing work for large exporters and which later got into making garments for an Italian buyer.

Her garment factory in Tiruverkadu, a suburb in West of Chennai, also houses the food business. As she talks about her journey as an entrepreneur, the travails she went through first in the garment business and subsequently in Triguni Food, Daga insists that you taste one of her products. She does not take ‘no, thanks’ for an answer and when you settle for a sabudhana khichdi , she asks an employee to bring a jar of hot water, pours it into the food herself and waits for the timer that she places on the table to show that eight minutes are up.

You give the food the thumbs-up and she happily says that every batch of food that is made is tested for quality. Triguni Food’s menu includes vegetable biriyani , bisibele bath , poha , tamarind rice, cheese rice, semiya khichdi and rava kesari .

When she started this food business, she believed her consumers would mainly be students. But she soon realised that the price put it beyond the reach of students. It was a call one fine day in 2012 from IndiGo asking for a sample that changed her company’s fortunes. Now, IndiGo accounts for nearly 90 per cent of Triguni Food’s sales. Daga is keen to sell it to more institutional clients apart from increasing retail sales.

Daga’s husband was a top corporate executive in Chennai in the 1970s, which is when she moved to the city from Kolkata. She recalls those days when she was involved in a lot of social work. She joined a leading travel agency in the mid-1970s and worked in the travel industry for a couple of years, mainly because she did not want to sit at home all the time. Her first venture as an entrepreneur when she did small jobs for garment exporters was more to help employ under-privileged women. Even at that time, she says, she was particular about quality. This led to her getting quite a large order by her reckoning in the early 1990s, when she got an export order from an Italian buyer. Daga says she was at her wit’s end as she could not get bank funding to execute the order. By this time, she had also moved to Delhi and was constantly travelling between Delhi, her home, and Chennai, where her unit was located.

She says she borrowed money from family, relatives and friends. She promised all of them that she would repay their money at the then prevailing interest rate of 24 per cent. Finally, she says, thanks to the very same friend who helped her get the export order, she was able to get a loan from a nationalised bank. She executed the order, and repaid all the money.

She says it was her passion for business that kept her going against all odds. “You need passion and dedication to your work,” she says. She was able to succeed because of this and also because she believed in the need for team work and inculcating a sense of pride and belonging in her workers.

Even as she went about her garments business – which at the peak employed nearly 900 workers and has now been scaled down to around 500 – Daga wanted to be in the foods business.

She started off making marmalades and jams, but was warned by a corporate executive friend of theirs that this would require deep pockets. It is then that she hit upon the idea of -to-eat foods and Triguni Food of which she is the Managing Director came into being in 2010-11.

According to her, she learnt de-hydrating the food by experience, bought machines from an American supplier, tweaked them to suit Indian conditions and launched different products, after testing them out for a substantial period of time and ensuring their quality and shelf life. Daga remembers March 19, 2012 as if it was just yesterday. For, it was on that day that IndiGo called up and asked for a few samples.

By the first week of April, the airline had placed orders for food to be served on board its aircraft. “IndiGo has been a door opener for us,” says Daga. Since then, there has been no looking back for her venture.

Triguni Food has roped in more institutional buyers, let go of a few that were not regular in their payment and introduced new varieties of food.

Triguni Food, which has about 90 employees, will shortly launch a ready-to-eat vada that can be eaten dunked in curd, rasam or sambar .

How much longer does she plan to run the business herself? “I am giving myself till 2016,” she says. Her son is helping her now with the business, but she is not sure if he will want to take it over and run it.

It can be another player that can take the venture to greater heights, she adds.

Her venture has applied for a high-tension electricity connection and once that is given, she feels she can substantially increase the output from the nearly 90,000 tubs it makes now. Then it can hope to send it to distributors in other cities. Daga says web sales of her products have increased.

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