KARWAR: This electronic engineer chose the less trodden road. When it is de rigueur for engineering graduates to take the software route through campus interviews and land assignments abroad, Naveen Hegde, an engineering graduate from Sirsi in Karnataka, did an about-turn. Naveen decided to return to his village in Sirsi and set up a business that would offer direct and indirect employment to villagers, even if it was in a small way. And that’s how his start-up iTOrFood was formed.
If returning to his village to do business was risky enough, starting a beverages company where he had practically no hands-on experience was even riskier. But Naveen had set out to do this even before he graduated. He did his own ground work on selling beverages, more specifically natural juices. He assessed the pulse of the market and trends.
And in 2015 at the age of 23, Naveen turned entrepreneur with iTOrFood, iTOr being an abbreviation for Idea to Reality. It pretty much sums up his own journey.Naveen says, “I was not interested to leave my parents alone in the village and go to metros in search of a job. I kept thinking of starting an initiative at my village. I explained my idea to them and they were very supportive.”
With the backing of his parents, he invested nearly `15 lakh along with a partner and began to produce juices without adding flavours, colours and preservatives at his village Hulgol, about 15 km from Sirsi. Concentrating on the markets of Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Mangaluru, Naveen has been producing these juices under the brand name ‘Hooglu’. It was just meant to be a catchy word, derived from his village name Hulgol and making it sound similar to Google, that is Hulgol + Google = Hooglu.
“We got help from the Indian Institute of Horticulture Research in Bengaluru. They gave us a lot of technical support. We also got some discounts on machineries under the scheme of National Horticulture Mission and started our unit at my village,” says Naveen.Today, Naveen’s company has given direct employment to 10 people while another 15 people are indirectly employed in sales through his start-up. The daily production is 2,000 units of juice packs.