INDIA’S FIRST ONE-STOP SHOP FOR SAVOURY SNACKS TAKES OFF, AND HOW!

Ashish Nichani and Sudarsan Metla laughingly insist they could be characters out of 3 Idiots—they attended engineering colleges, followed by management schools, and ended up in banks, hot in the pursuit of careers riding on money. Till the boredom of their work drove them into the warm and welcoming arms of food. It is the vertical they have been in since 2014, when they launched their online marketplace for hyper-local food products—more than 4,000 of them from 400 local producers spread across 124 locations.

Nichani and Metla’s CVs are quite similar to those of the food industry’s new leaders, such as the founders of Zomato, Swiggy, The Beer Café and Chai Point (and many others), and the reason I couldn’t wait to get to know them better was the way they have created a national marketplace for sleekly packaged savoury snacks—35 in all, including two pickles and six desserts—drawn out from the culinary banks of our cities and towns. Postcard is what Nichani and Metla call their brand, because each of their snacks is like a postcard for the city or town they represent.

It is only while digging the Bengaluru Harigalu, a spicy mix of groundnuts and pulses, I learnt that the name Bengaluru was the compound of two words—‘benda’ and ‘kalooru’, which combined together means the ‘land of groundnuts’. Or that Burhanpur, Madhya Pradesh, was to be the original site of the Taj, till it was found to be too far away from the source of the pure white marble that went into the construction of the mausoleum. Not that we are any poorer, for its peppery gathiya, an ideal match for the town’s kala jaleba (black jalebi), is more than adequate compensation.

Examples such as these abound across India, from Gujarat’s savoury and sweet Jamnagari chivda to Tamil Nadu’s Sattur Seeval from Tamil Nadu, and because Postcard insists on getting their products prepared at their places of origin, their authenticity can be guaranteed. It also justifies the claim of the company’s founders that they would expand their range to 150-170 products sooner than we would imagine.