Raadhika Gupta, a lawyer and a Harvard Law School graduate, and Amit Gupta, an MBA graduate from XLRI, Jamshedpur, were perplexed by how children from low-income families do not get access to nutritious food.

In an attempt to change this reality, the husband-wife duo set up the Foodshaala Foundation, a non-profit organisation, in 2018.

Raadhika’s extensive work with NGOs focused on food distribution and Amit’s diploma in nutrition and public health helped them understand the gaps on the ground.

In 2019, Foodshaala Foundation set up community kitchens serving more than 1,500 children from low-income communities in the Gurugram district with daily nutritious meals.

These community kitchens employed local women who were trained to cook nutritious food using their local ingredients.

Sharing a few hacks they used to make meals more nutritious, Raadhika says, “The filling we used in our sandwich was not potato. Instead, we used soya.”

“We added a lot of green leafy vegetables into the noodles that children loved, and prepared pooris using red and green spinach instead of maida.”

Through Foodshaala, they wanted to make communities realise that making healthy food is neither expensive nor complex.

But when India went into lockdown in March 2020 and schools shut down, everything changed for Raadhika and Amit.

Since then, Foodshaala has primarily focused on spreading awareness among children from low-income families, along with their teachers and parents, about health and nutrition in schools.

They do this through their flagship School Nutrition Awareness Programme (SNAP). The programme uses gamification to encourage children to take real steps towards behaviour change.

This, says Raadhika, will lead to improvements in the knowledge, attitude and behaviour of children towards healthy eating. It will also reduce the consumption of junk food.

Today, healthy and nutritious foods like sprouts, fruits, millet, and leafy vegetables have made it to the plates of many children from the marginalised sections.

Overall, through their awareness programmes, Foodshaala has reached out to more than 4,000 children across low-income communities in Delhi NCR, Pune, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Bengaluru.

Expert nutritionists – like Dr Rupal Dalal, a paediatrician, Dr Ratnaraje Thar, a renowned nutritionist, and Sonam Jain, a certified dietician – are part of the team.

They help develop recipes and advise on the curriculum for their nutritional awareness sessions.

Each awareness programme by Foodshaala consists of six workshops covering topics like macronutrients, micronutrients, diet diversity, how to read food labels, harms of junk food, etc.