BENGALURU: The year 2017 was a big one for Akash Sajith. Until then, he was working in a start-up in Bengaluru when he heard the news that both his parents were diagnosed with cancer. He couldn’t wrap his head around the fact that though both were extremely healthy, exercised regularly and ate healthy, the Big C got the better of them. Sajith’s father passed away in 2019 and his mother moved to the US with his older brother for better treatment. Meanwhile, Sajith continued working in Bengaluru while still not being able to process his parents’ diagnoses.
“After reading a bunch of medical journals and reports, I realised that most of the food we consume is contaminated with harmful chemicals. Honestly, the numbers on the reports were so scary that I was too nervous to eat anything,” he tells CE, adding that he soon realised the inaccessibility to fresh and organic food in the country. He came up with the idea of converting one of his bedrooms in his HSR home to grow leafy vegetables. “I know it sounds crazy but I started growing our regularly used greens in my bedroom and started consuming them.
Eventually, they grew so much that I had to give some away to people. After a point, one of my friends suggested that we start a subscription- based service to deliver organic food,” he says. And thus, Living Food Company was born in 2018. In the last four years, the company has advanced extensively, clocking a 600 per cent growth in just the last six months: they started off with leafy vegetables, but now they have expanded to fruits, other vegetables, and even bakery products, all organically sourced or made.
The customers prefer ordering online, and the products are then delivered fresh. “Ice apple or nungu is something many of our customers look forward to in the year. We’ve tied up with vendors from Tamil Nadu to supply this for us.” Thanks to this and other similar initiatives, the vendors are making more money than they would have otherwise.
Sajith has grand plans for his company, which include branching out of Bengaluru and hitting other cosmopolitan cities in the country. Mumbai is one of the cities on his mind for now, but there is no concrete plan as of yet. With his wife Shikha Lakhanpal being the other co-founder of the company, they sometimes find it difficult to keep their worklives separate from home. But then again, he admits that it doesn’t feel like work at all.