This MBA quit IBM to start millet business; clocks Rs2.5 crore annual turnover

Annapurna Kalluri landed her first job at IBM India’s hardware marketing team after completing her MBA. With a passion for entrepreneurship since childhood, it wasn’t long before she started looking for startup ideas.

“I come from a family of entrepreneurs. My father has an engineering fabrication unit in Hyderabad, Telangana, and I have grown up seeing him work on his ideas to scale his business. I wanted to be a food entrepreneur since I was in class eight,” says Annapurna, CEO of Sri Haritha Agro Food Products, which sells millet products under the Avasya brand apart from supplying millet meals to government institutions and contract manufacturing for other brands.

In 2006, she resigned from her job and pursued a course in SAP Sales and Distribution to strengthen her entrepreneurial skills before starting her millet business. 

Her enterprise is now targeting revenue of Rs25 crore in the next three to four years. Annapurna is setting up a new factory in Hyderabad which will also manufacture millet noodles and pasta apart from the current range of millet energy bites, breakfast mixes, flakes, flours, and other products. 

“Since food processing was my area of interest, I started visiting various institutions like IIT Bombay and Defence Food Research Laboratory (DFRL) in Mysore to learn more,” she says.

DFRL is known for developing food products and technologies for the Indian Armed Forces. “I also attended a training programme on extrusion foods.” Extrusion is a food processing technique that uses heat, pressure, and shearing to cook and shape materials into flakes, chips, crackers and croutons.

Why millets

Though Annapurna wanted to work with fruits and vegetables, her father suggested millets, which are more suited to the local climate. Telangana is one of the top five states in India for exporting millets and cultivating nine types of millet crops like jowar, ragi, pearl millet etc.

The millet market in India was valued at 5.05 billion dollars in 2022 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 16.7 percent between 2021 and 2026. 

India’s millet packaged food market size was valued at 37.7 million dollars in 2022 and is expected to reach 91.1 million dollars by 2032, as per Transparency Market Research. The highest segment in this market is millet-based snacks, followed by breakfast cereals and breads.

Also Read: 7 millet entrepreneurs changing India’s food habits profitably

“When I was starting, millets were not much talked about. I felt we could do well in the field by using the versatile extrusion technology,” says Annapurna.

However, an extruder is an expensive machine, costing Rs 1 crore 1.5 crore. “There was no way I could invest that amount. At that time, my husband’s brother was studying at IIT Kharagpur. I went to the library there and photocopied all the material on the extrusion technology,” she recollects.

“We started fabricating the extrusion machine in my father’s factory in 2009. He developed it out of scrap in the engineering unit for Rs6.5 lakh,” Annapurna shares.

She then leased a place in ALEAP (Association of Lady Entrepreneurs of India) Industrial Estate in Hyderabad to start manufacturing. 

The challenges of millet entrepreneurship

“Since the machine wasn’t very sophisticated, we faced many hurdles. The machine would get stuck and we could not start production. Finally, I used a recipe for millet-based snacks in circular pellet shape,” she says.

“This accidental product turned out well and became a hit,” the woman entrepreneur says.

Also Read: Computer science professor turns millet entrepreneur, earns Rs 3 crore annually

Annapurna took a loan of Rs26 lakh, which was approved after difficulty as the bank had seen many failures in the food processing sector. Annapurna also received a Rs7.5 lakh subsidy from the Ministry of Food Processing. “I repaid the loan well on time,” she says.

The next challenge for her was to convince retailers to stock her products. 

“I went from shop to shop with products in my car, requesting retailers in Hyderabad to stock the millet-based snacks. I faced many rejections.”

In six months, she realised that most retail outlets had no interest in selling these products as their shelves were full of MNC food items.

Diversifying into the government sector

This prompted her to look for other ways to utilize her production facility. At around that time, after reading an article, she approached Akshaya Patra’s Hyderabad centre, which had excess rice after feeding the children. “I met the head, Lakshmikant Prabhu, and offered to convert their extra rice into a protein-rich snack, but government rules did not permit giving the FCI rice to any private player,” she recollects. 

“However, to enhance nutrition in children’s meals, they agreed to buy our protein-rich snacks, based on millets, soya and lentils. We started making protein-rich snacks and energy bites with millets, soya and cereals for 30,000 children,” she says.

Also Read: Chemical engineer’s healthy food startup finds global buyers, empowers rural women

The company supplied for their feeding projects till 2019. Alongside, Annapurna expanded the product range to flakes, muesli, and breakfast mixes like millet idli-dosa, poha, Pongal, upma and khichdi and began contract manufacturing for other millet brands.

“We worked with government hostels, anganwadis, tribal communities and educational institutions. They were our biggest clients till COVID struck,” the millet entrepreneur says. 

Like most businesses, her enterprise was also hit. “After the lockdown was announced, ICRISAT requested us to supply to tribal women and children who lacked supplies due to COVID. On April 2, 2020, we opened the factory for six months.

After that, all projects went on hold due to lack of funds. Only some contract manufacturing work continued. 

Annapurna used that time to build her own Avasya brand and took it online. From hitting a low of Rs20 lakh in annual revenue in 2021 due to COVID-19, the company has emerged stronger. Sri Haritha Agro Food is setting up its new factory on half an acre in Hyderabad due to the rising number of export queries and expanding demand for its products. “We now make flakes of all millets, barley, wheat, fenugreek and other foods,” she says.

The old plant can make one tonne of breakfast cereals and snacks and 600kg of instant mixes daily. “The new plant will have a daily capacity to manufacture two tonnes of each product. We will be adding millet noodles and millet pasta to the product range,” she adds.

(Rashmi Pratap is a Mumbai-based journalist specialising in business, financial, and socio-economic reporting)

Also Read: Engineer couple brings millets back to homes, clocks Rs 2.05 crore annual turnover

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