Hyderabad: After Covid-19, everyone is shifting to nutritious and immunity-boosting foods, a category where millets score a point over other foods. To capitalise on this, two women in Hyderabad started 'Millet Mantra' and went on to garner wide attention from health-conscious foodies. It is not before facing a variety of challenges that Poojitha and Kirthi landed where they are today after two years of starting their business. Let's know what difficulties they overcame before reaching their goal - making people chant 'Millet Mantra'.
Most people do not like small grains (millets) as they don't taste right. To overcome this, Millet Mantra came out with tastier millet products made with pure healthy palm jaggery, honey, almonds, strawberry, blueberry, cranberry fruits, nuts, dry fruits, apple crush and Belgaine dark chocolate. Their popular offerings now are Nut Delight, Dark Chocolate Mosely, Diet Mosely, and Berry Blast. These are available and sold in leading malls in all major cities including Hyderabad.
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Efforts to start the business ahead of the Corona pandemic were unsuccessful. That's why Poojitha Reddy started a year later. She did extensive research in rare cereals. She received training at IIMR Millet Incubation Center, National Millet Research Institute, Rajendranagar. She also underwent scientific training on manufacturing and marketing techniques of various snack products in different flavors. The IIMR organization has also provided financial support for setting up a start-up and the scientists have supported it. Once they got a grant of Rs 5 lakh to enable business operations to proceed smoothly, there was no looking back.
Later, along with Kirthi, Poojitha invested more than Rs 25 lakh personally and made progress in online marketing. Incidentally, 2023 was declared as the International Year of Small Grains by the United Nations. Millet Mantra products come in the attractive packets - 300 grams of Nut Delight at Rs 236, Dark Chocolate Mosely at Rs 236, Diet Mosely at Rs 230, and Berry Blast at Rs 235 each.
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Poojitha Reddy Boojala, a post-graduate in agriculture, quit her high-paying job in Bengaluru after the budding entrepreneur in her propelled her to return to Hyderabad and give her many business ideas a concrete shape. Her sole objective was to do something new in the ever growing business of health foods. She considered offering strong, nutrition-rich breakfast foods a business that would click amid people neglecting this one aspect because of busy modern work lifestyles.
In 2020, Poojitha took help from her friend Kirthi and together they began 'Millet Mantra' as a start-up. They gradually expanded the business online to provide quality tasty snack products to consumers. Their business steadily got a foothold by marketing 4 types of breakfast products, rich in high proteins and fiber.
In today's modern life, many people do not take breakfast in the morning due to stress at work and business. They go on an empty stomach without eating because they are afraid of getting late to office. In the course of duty, they take junk food, chips, and flour products to their offices or work areas to quench their hunger but not to meet nutrition needs. If both couple have jobs and businesses, this gap further widens.
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Poojitha and Kirthi have targetted their Millet Mantra products at such people. Add some hot water or milk and eat right away. By eating this completely organic and natural breakfast, you can not only easily digest but will not fall hungry soon while getting all that much needed nutrition. Hailing from Hyderabad, Poojita Reddy completed her BSc in Agriculture from Professor Jayashankar Agricultural University to work for the welfare of farmers. Later she completed Post Graduation in Agri-Business Management from Gujarat Navsari Agricultural University in 2016-18.
The two women overcame all difficulties that cropped up initially regarding investment, manufacturing, transportation, marketing, and personnel. An MoU was signed with a company in Gujarat to provide additional value to small grains grown by farmers. That's why they got the opportunity to do online and offline marketing at pan India level.
