BENGALURU : This start-up vows to make the ‘what to eat’ worries a thing of the past. People who can potentially burn down a kitchen with their cooking will soon have an option of letting the food packaging do the job of preparing the food for them. Extovate Venture, a Bengaluru-based startup, is working with CSIR-CFTRI and is collaborating with food companies to bring out a wide range of food items that can be cooked with the help of its packaging material itself. With the press of a button on the packaging, the food can be heated up.
Along with his mentor, Shah Parag Chinubai, Vedanth Girish came up with this idea of increasing the convenience of cooking food. They have been working on this product for more than a year now, since the founding of Extovate in March, 2017.During his time in a boot camp for entrepreneurship in Pune, Vedanth came up with this idea for his project. “Even while I was studying in London and Singapore, I had no convenient means of cooking food. I did not have time to cook a complete meal.
When I came back here, I saw that everyone else was facing the same situation,” he says, “and I decided that something should be done about making food convenient. Many people who don’t have time to cook their meals can use this.” He also believes that this will lead to invention of more kinds of food that can be heated up from its package itself.
They faced problems in three categories, as Vedanth explains. One, they had to find someone who could understand the technology. Two, they had to convince their clients that their idea would work. Three, there was little financial stability as Vedanth is funding the start-up on his own family’s savings. “Along with this, I had a straight 100 to 200 days which were complete failures with no concrete results coming from them”, says Vedanth, a 26-year-old graduate from the London School of Economics with a bachelor’s degree in International Business and Entrepreneurship.
Vedanth remembers when he could not convince a particular client about his idea. “Most of the clients always said that this idea works only on paper but not commercially. He believed me only after I gave him a prototype of the technology.”Currently, Extovate is working with breakfast mixes, instant noodles and tea and coffee powder companies among other ready-to-make food items. “When compared to other start-ups, we are not very different. We recognised the already existing vaccum in the market and decided to fix it”
Extovate plans on creating technology that can chill beverages and keep them cold. “When you want a cold coke, you have to go to a super market to get it. But now you can cool it yourself. The idea is to eliminate the need for a refrigerator itself”. The start-up will be focusing more on working with beer industry because he believes that the consumption is comparatively high there.