Slurrp Farm Success Story: How 2 Mothers Turned India’s Forgotten Grains Into A ₹100 Crore Kids Food Brand

They met at a Diwali party in London.

Shauravi Malik was working at Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group as an investment manager, having built her career through JP Morgan’s Consumer, Healthcare, and Retail Advisory team after reading economics at St. Stephen’s College and Cambridge University. Meghana Narayan was a former national-level swimmer who had swum for India at the Asian Games, collected over 400 national gold medals in the pool, and then gone on to become a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and an MBA from Harvard Business School before landing at McKinsey and Company’s public health practice in India.

Between them, they had credentials that could have taken them anywhere. What brought them together, at a Diwali party in London of all places, was a shared frustration that no resume could solve: they could not find genuinely good food for their children.

That frustration, aired between two mothers who happened to be at the same party, eventually became Slurrp Farm.

The Gap That Was Right In Front Of Everyone

The problem Shauravi and Meghana had identified was not obscure. It was sitting on every supermarket shelf in India, obvious to anyone who looked closely enough. The packaged food available for young children had barely changed since their own childhoods. Sugar-heavy breakfast cereals. Processed biscuits. Maida-based snacks with long ingredient lists and short nutritional value. The category had been in stasis for decades while the parents buying it had grown considerably more informed about what their children were actually eating.

What made the problem sharper was something Shauravi had observed while living in London: the contrast between the quality and variety of children’s food available abroad and what was on Indian shelves. Friends visiting from India would ask her to bring back baby food. Not because Indian food was inferior in its raw form, India grows some of the most nutritious grains on earth, but because nobody had packaged those grains well enough to make them convenient and genuinely appealing to urban families.

The irony was pointed. Jowar, bajra, and ragi, the millets that had nourished Indian families for centuries and that Indian grandmothers had been cooking confidently for generations, had been quietly stigmatised in urban India as old-fashioned, rural, and less desirable than imported oats and commercial breakfast cereals. Meanwhile, the global health and wellness industry was busily rediscovering these same grains and marketing them back to urban consumers at premium prices.

“From the time that you were a child to now, the choice on the shelf for what a baby or a child eats is pretty much the same,” Meghana has said of the market they were looking at when they decided to start Slurrp Farm.

Three Years In The Kitchen Before A Single Product Launched

Slurrp Farm was officially launched in October 2016 under its parent company Wholsum Foods. But the founding story begins earlier, around 2013, when Shauravi and Meghana started working on the idea in their own home kitchens.

“We officially launched the brand in October 2016 but we invested time, energy and our own money into extensive R&D for three years before that,” Shauravi has said.

Those 3 years were not a casual experimentation phase. They were a sustained attempt to solve one of the hardest problems in food manufacturing: making something that tastes as good on a shelf as it does in a home kitchen, without adding anything that should not be there. No refined sugar. No trans fats. No artificial preservatives. No maida. Every ingredient had to justify its presence nutritionally, and the product still had to taste good enough that a toddler would actually eat it willingly.

“Our biggest challenge has been to find a way to make what tastes delicious in a home kitchen taste the same on a shelf when it reaches your hands, without adding anything to it,” Shauravi has explained.

The founding trio was completed by Umang Bhattacharyya, who joined as the third co-founder to help build the operational and supply chain backbone that a food manufacturing business at scale requires. The first two products to launch were cereals, made with whole wheat, rice, ragi, fruits, vegetables, and milk, and cookies, made with whole wheat, ragi, oats, raisins, banana, chocolate, and cheese. Both were formulated to be nutritious enough for the founders to feel good about feeding to their own children, the test that every Slurrp Farm product still has to pass.

Making Millets Cool Again

The most significant strategic bet Slurrp Farm has made since its founding is not one that gets discussed as a business decision. It is the decision to build an entire brand around ingredients that urban India had spent a generation trying to move away from.

Ragi mudde. Jowar rotis. Bajra khichdi. These were the foods of grandmothers’ kitchens, of rural households, of a pre-packaged-food India that urban consumers associated with austerity rather than aspiration. The global superfood industry had, by 2016, started talking about millets enthusiastically. But in India itself, the repositioning had not happened. Nobody had made jowar and ragi feel like something you would choose rather than settle for.

Slurrp Farm set out to change that. Every product in its range was built to demonstrate that millet-based food could be genuinely delicious, child-friendly, and aspirational enough to sit on an urban family’s shelf without apology. Pancake mixes. Dosa mixes. Noodles. Pasta. Cookies. Fruit strips. Puffs. The product range expanded category by category, always with the same brief: take something made from good grains and make it genuinely irresistible to children.

The strategy aligned with a cultural moment that was, at the time, just beginning to arrive. India’s International Year of Millets in 2023 brought jowar, bajra, and ragi into mainstream policy and media conversations in a way that gave Slurrp Farm a structural tailwind it had been building ahead of for seven years. The brand that had been quietly repositioning millets as premium children’s food since 2016 was suddenly operating in a national conversation about why millets matter.

The Funding That Built The Business

Slurrp Farm’s capital history reflects steady, staged growth from an early-stage D2C brand into a business with genuine institutional backing and international investor confidence.

Fireside Ventures was among the earliest institutional backers, investing in the brand in 2019, a period when the company had recently crossed its first 500,000 customers and was demonstrating that the millet-led, no-junk positioning was genuinely resonating with urban Indian parents. Fireside has remained a consistent investor across multiple rounds, a strong signal of continued conviction in both the founders and the category.

The Investment Corporation of Dubai and Raed Ventures, both Middle East-focused investment entities, joined subsequent rounds, reflecting an international appetite for the brand and a recognition that the Indian diaspora and Gulf markets represented meaningful demand for premium, health-focused Indian children’s food. In January 2024, a $7.2 million round from Sharrp Ventures, Fireside Ventures, and Raed Capital brought fresh growth capital into the business. The most recent raise, a ₹30 crore extension from Scarlet Ventures as part of the Series C round, brings total funding raised to approximately $21.2 million across seven rounds from 30 investors.

₹100 Crore And A Distribution Footprint To Match

Slurrp Farm crossed ₹100 crore in annual revenue, a milestone that places it firmly among India’s leading D2C food brands in the children’s category. The business operates across multiple channels simultaneously: its own D2C website, all major e-commerce marketplaces, modern trade retail, and offline stores in India, the UAE, and Singapore, a distribution footprint that has grown from the founders’ first exhibition appearances to a genuinely omnichannel operation with over 104 employees.

The product range that a customer can find today is considerably broader than the initial cereal and cookie launches. The brand maintains a strict no-refined-sugar, no-trans-fat, no-artificial-preservatives, no-maida policy across its entire catalogue, a commitment that is operationally harder and more expensive to maintain than its competitors’ formulation approach but that has become Slurrp Farm’s most durable differentiator.

Two Founders Who Did Not Have To Do This

The detail that makes Slurrp Farm’s founding story particularly compelling is not the product or the market timing. It is the opportunity cost embedded in the decision to start the company at all.

Meghana Narayan held a Harvard MBA, a Rhodes Scholarship from Oxford, and a career at McKinsey’s public health practice. She had swum for India at the Asian Games and accumulated more than 400 national gold medals in competitive swimming. These are not the credentials of someone with limited options. Shauravi Malik had built a finance career at JP Morgan and worked directly for Sir Richard Branson at Virgin Group in London, after reading economics at Cambridge. Again, not someone who needed to start a food company to build a meaningful career.

They chose to start Slurrp Farm not because they needed to but because the problem was real and the gap was genuine. “We are a brand started by two mothers, for their children and yours,” is how the co-founders have described the company. That framing, mothers building for other mothers rather than entrepreneurs building for a market, is something that has run through the brand’s identity since its first day and continues to shape how it communicates with the parents who buy its products.

India’s children’s health food market, valued at roughly $1.5 billion and growing at approximately 12 to 15% annually, is a category that was largely unorganised and unbranded when Slurrp Farm entered it. The brand that started with two mothers in a home kitchen and a millet that urban India had almost forgotten is now one of the most recognised names in that market.