Onion Brings Tears but also Moolah

Mumbai 19.05.2018.

Today I was at Sardar Patel Technology Business Incubator ( SP-TBI)  for an event 'Founder Speaks'.This incubator functions at Bhavan's campus in Andheri Suburb of Mumbai.

SP-TBI invited Satyajit Roy, founder and CEO of an starter EGK Foods Pvt Ltd. He was in coversation with SwitchMe founder Aditya Misra. 

Satyajit narrates his journey in a very passionate way. Before his present venture there were five failed ideas. “I decided to aggregate all the chatwalas under Mychatwala, where one could get bhel, batata puri and sev puri delivered to the doorstep. Another launch was pet insurance, which exists worldwide but almost doesn’t exist here. Then came organic mushrooms,” reminisces Satyajit. Soon, things came to a standstill. “I was running out of savings, running out of people’s trust. It also boiled down to not trusting myself,” .

The entrepreneurial spirit of Satyajit refused to die down though. He burned all his savings in his failed ventures. 

“One Sunday I left my house at 9 am to run an errand and returned around noon to see my poor mother, who had been chopping away for three hours, in a puddle of onion tears. I pointed out to my mother that a better use of her time would be to buy this product from the market directly, to which she replied that no such product was available in any of the shops that she went to,” recalls Satyajit.

A quick Google search revealed that no such product was available in the domestic markets, but it did exist abroad. At that point, he was struck by the thought that this may be a great solution for the domestic Indian market.

That was the beginning of Everyday Gourmet Kitchen in 2014. Under its flagship product, it offers fresh fried onions to commercial and residential kitchens, thereby taking away the pain of peeling, chopping and frying onions.

He narrated  his idea to his closed friends and relatives. They saw his passion and determination and started helping him. There was a single investor who had given him Rs.23 lac. 

Small packets of fried onions (also called birista) were prepared and handed over to the National Sports Club (NSCI) at Haji Ali . “We are members there. They agreed to keep it on the shelf and see if there was any demand for the product. That is how our retail journey started. We got a fantastic response and even today, three years later, that store continues to sell the most quantity of our fried onions,” he said.

Immediately after, Satyajit participated in a culinary event, the food exhibition at magazine called UpperCrust, “wherein under-30 entrepreneurs were getting a table to showcase their wares. Every mom who came to my table gave me actual validation of the idea, since they yearned for a respite from the laborious task. This helped spur me further,” he said. Though retailing was a profitable option, the team wanted to rake in bigger volumes. EGK then decided to target the B2B sector such as hotels, restaurants and caterers.

To get things off the mark, the team approached Afshin Kohinoor at Britannia and Company, one of Mumbai’s most iconic eateries. Soon, the biristas became an integral part of the restaurant’s famed Chicken Salli Boti and Berry Pulao.

Larger kitchens were next on the menu, and deals followed with restaurant chains such as Zafaran and Delhi Darbar.

“We made a conscious pivot two years ago to do more B2B business, since it is less costlier than B2C. Educating consumers on the retail side is time consuming, and expensive, and we can’t handle the credit cycles of big companies, which have a payment cycle of 3-6 months,” he said.

' EGK has grown  out of five kitchens to a bigger space where our 100 staff undertake daily chopping and frying of 15,000 kg or fifteen tonnes of raw onions. As of now only peeling is manual, but we should be 90 per cent automated soon,” he adds.

Fondly known in food circles as ‘Onion Knight’, Satyajit, at the age of 30, is Managing Director & CEO, EGK Foods Pvt. Ltd — a food processing concern that deals with onions and its by-products.

In his spare time, Satyajit enjoys literature and the performing arts, with an avid interest in storytelling and listening, as well. He also mentors early-stage startups to avoid making common mistakes through active participation in Entrepreneurship Cells.

While some among us enjoy the laborious process of basting, baking and blanching to come up with a Michelin-grade plate of food for our loved ones, lesser mortals do appreciate any help to fix things quickly and easily. Satyajit Roy’s family belonged to the former group. Coming from a Bengali background, mutton biryani was a weekly affair in his household. However, the indulgence came with a lot of tasks.

To Satyajit the product should add convenience, adding flavor and texture to a dish was secondary. The time-saving aspect to the mundane and cumbersome task was what caught Satyajit’s fancy.

Satyajit says, “There is a 25 percent wastage of all onions that are grown in India. The reason being the farmers don't get a fair price for the produce due to volatility of the markets and improper storage conditions. Since there is an abundance of produce we intend to make a dent in the wastage figure, which stands at approximately five million tonnes yearly.”

Traditionally, fried onions are used in the making and garnishing of biryanis of all types. This is one of the primary uses for EGK Fresh Fried Onions. 

I asked him,' How you maintain consistency in taste, flavor and quality while sourcing is done from different regions ?'

'We have an in-house food technologist, who observe strict quality control by maintaining  right kind of chemical composition.'

'Right now you are the lone producers of this product and monopolise the market. Suppose big players like ITC and Patanjali jump into competition how you will compete with them ?'

'I am in touch with these people , I do not foresee such possibility in near future.'  

Satyajit is fondly known in food circles as Onion Knight. He is a serial entrepreneur and has a string of startups that saw little or no success before EGK. 

Its revenue model works on the economies of scale and investing in the right technology to keep the operating costs down. It plans to have backward integrated farms by the end of this year where it not only offers buy-back guarantees but also technology that would help in increasing yield.

For the future it plans on adding a basket of products complementing fried onions that have been requested by existing clients. 

“We plan to make most of our progress in the B2B and Hotel/Restaurant/Cafee (HoReCa) space next year as well as slowly make a presence in the retail market through a presence in larger retail chains. We also plan to start our export business for which we have seen tremendous demand over the last one year,” says Satyajit.

'I was using technique allows our product EGK Fresh Fried Onions to stay crisp for up to 6 months. This is the reason that our consumers like the product so much because we are able to maintain consistency in crispiness as well as flavor'.

'Apart from taste and flavor of your product, do you think packaging design will play any role in attracting your target customers? How are you going to tap this opportunity?'

 As we had make our first move in Modern Trade and General Trade we have specially designed our packaging to attract customers off the shelves directly. Through extensive sampling we plan to build a massive direct to consumer customer base over the next few months.