A cushy MNC job overseas is charming. A golden passport to Silicon Valley is even more enticing. Nail any of these however and a techie’s life is sorted. This is not the norm or the dead end street in which a techie gets caught up. A bunch of software professionals iterallyproved their talent to ‘cook-up’ happiness and success.
Soon after college, when boys their age dreamt of a happily ever after with a six-digit salary a month, fat bank account and all earthly pleasures in exchange for their youthful days and efforts, Akash Mathew and Jim George traced back their roots, deciding to sustain the farmer legacy.
The tech graduates are in the third month of their start-up Farming Colours in Kochi. The techies, who played with technology and app creation, came out of the comforts of their techie garb to spread the fruits of safe eating to denizens.
“Our parents have been talking a lot about organic food but we did not take them seriously until we visited farms outside the state where vegetables were cultivated for consumers in Kerala. The entire village was under the grip of cancer due to pesticides and chemicals overuse. Farmers are often exploited by middlemen cashing in on their lack of knowledge in consumer needs. Consumers, on the other hand, are getting more conscious about their health and food habits. All these prompted us to think differently,” says Akash, COO of Farming Colours.
Farming Colours team members
Procuring farm-fresh products directly from the farmers, they just reaped success of serving 200 plus satisfied customers in Kochi in more than 2000 deliveries. “On the business side, in two-and-a-half months, we were able to retain 75 per cent of customers. The focus is to hit 600 customers in another six months. Over this period, we raised ' 25 lakh as seed fund and will be raising another Rs 25 lakh in a couple of months. We are using WhatsApp, Facebook, Wordpress and a lot of Google Spread Sheets to manage our operations. There are plans to expand to three more new farms,” says Akash.
Until five years back, Tigy Thankachan, like any other software professional of his kind, also was a regular at the state-of- the art food court inside the IT hub, Technopark in Thiruvananthapuram. It didn’t take long for the fly-in-the-ointment moment to befall him and dissatisfaction grew boundless.
The next assumption could be Tigy walking into the office in the morning holding a tiffin carrier from home and preach the virtues of homemade food to his colleagues He didn’t. Instead, he opened Danbauk Restaurant, a Malabar cuisine special food joint, in the Tejaswini Food Court. “I used to raise complaints about badly cooked food at those food outlets at first and then thought why can’t I open one at the place. Two-and-a half years went behind doing research alone before zeroing in on the Malabar menu. Experts in Malabari cuisines were flown in to prepare food for the customers,” Tigy traces the journey.
Tigy was soon accompanied by his college-pal Shavab Mohammed, who quit his job in the Middle East only to look after the restaurant. CEO of ITraits IT Solutions Private Limited in Technopark, Tigy is a proud restaurateur. Both Tigy and Shavab fill in about 400 platters every day. In Technopark itself, staffers from 40 or so IT companies, about a year ago shaped Prakruthi, an organisation that percolates the values of ‘go-green’. Promulgating safe-to-eat veggies is their prime goal. In a year, they grew to support 60 to 75 people a week by bringing in direct-from-farm products.
“Ours is a motley group of 120 people. At first, we procured vegetables from Nanniyode village panchayat that grows organic vegetables. Later on, the demand-production ratio turned disproportionately high and we switched to the farmers in Attingal and now we source materials from Peringamala village in the capital. No middlemen come into play and we manage the transportation by ourselves. The margin from selling each vegetable kit is invested in spreading children’s farm initiatives and other programmes on organic farming,” says Biju Sundaran, one of the coordinators of Prakruthi.
