mid-day's 42nd anniversary: A smart cookie

An advocate spotted a gap in the market for healthy snacks aimed at kids, and grabbed the opportunity with both hands

Rukmini Banerji, 38 
The lawyer-turned-entrepreneur’s cookie-making start-up is finding takers across all walks of life, including celeb mums

Ever since she gave birth to Aarav, now three, lawyer Rukmini Banerji had found the food market for children wanting. There weren’t any readymade snacks she could find that weren’t free of preservatives or sugar, and which were meant for the child to consume if the parents were too busy to whip up those in the kitchen. It set her thinking, and during the lockdown, she set the wheels in motion for The Growing Giraffe, an idea she had tried executing earlier in 2018, when she packaged hot meals made in her kitchen for working parents to feed their kids. “It didn’t work out, because the Indian family structure is such that you have grandparents and nannies to do that job,” Banerji tells us. She had to shelve that initial plan.

But things changed during the lockdown. The Chembur resident had been making sugar- and preservative-free cookies for Aarav at home, and they turned out so well that a friend told her, “Why don’t you make a business out of these?” It seemed like a sound proposition. So, having done the requisite R&D, Banerji appointed a chef in Mumbai and a food technologist in Gujarat to start making healthy cookies and nutrition bars for children. 

The products have no sugar or preservatives. Pic/Sayyed Sameer Abedi

But, she was at her family home in Santiniketan at that point, which was mid-last year. So, she started a long-distance correspondence with them to make the products healthier and tastier. “I was constantly tasting samples that were delivered to me and sending my feedback, and after several rounds of sampling, I thought that I had the right product,” she says, adding, “I then got a designer on board to get the packaging done, travelled to Mumbai when the lockdown lifted, and spoke to a third-party manufacturer to figure out that whole process. That’s how I set the ball rolling. I found a warehouse in Vasai to stock the products and brought a logistics person on board. There are in fact quite a few people working towards this business at this point in time.”

Funds have been the biggest challenge, though, since there’s no investor involved. “A lot of finance is required for things like influencer marketing for the brand,” Banerji laments, but what helps is that she has her own legal clients, retainers who supply the financial fuel needed to keep the business running. And right now, she is in the process of adding four more cookie flavours to the menu, apart from introducing savoury options as well. The brand’s website has testimonials from celebrities like Shilpa Shetty and Soha Ali Khan. So it seems that as far as Banerji’s venture is concerned, the cookie, so to speak, is far from crumbling.  

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