Raju Bhupati quit his job in the US to offer better nutrition to Indians, while catering to their distinct taste preferences.

He returned to Hyderabad in 2012 and started his entrepreneurial journey with a cloud kitchen that he ran till 2017.

After that, he shifted focus to millets, starting with millet-based parathas to “provide the same taste and higher nutrition at the cost of a normal wheat-based paratha”.

While demand was great and Raju sold 90,000 parathas monthly, the short shelf life meant that the venture couldn’t be scaled up.

The 48-year-old then came up with a better alternative — the millet chikki, and launched Troo Good in 2018.

With an in-house team of scientists, he formulated the millet chikki, which contains ragi, jowar, bajra and peanuts.

Today, the millet snack company sells around two million millet chikkis daily, and has a revenue of Rs 84 crore in FY 23-24.

“I found that in India, the Rs 5 and 10 snack market is huge. You mostly get chips, biscuits and other snacks in that price range. I saw that existing options only cater to taste. I wanted to focus on three fundamentals through Troo Good — affordability, taste and nutrition,” shares Raju.

Troo Good sells these chikkis in schools across Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.

They have tie-ups with the State Governments on multiple initiatives including child welfare, young mothers welfare and the mid-day meal scheme.

They have also tied up with The Akshaya Patra Foundation in Karnataka and Vedanta in Uttar Pradesh to supplement nutrition in the anganwadis.

“Today, we are dealing with a major issue of malnutrition. I found that millets could be a panacea for solving the nutrition issue in the country,” Raju notes.

Troo Good has set up five manufacturing plants in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and makes all products in-house.

Through their farm-to-fork approach, the company directly works with about 15,000 farmers in these states. Raju says that Troo Good is the largest purchaser of millets in the country.