Outside the day job
Manufacturing Plant Startup
Co-founded and ran a food-manufacturing venture from scratch; an entrepreneurial education in operations, distribution, and competing against giants.
TL;DR
Before my path led to product management and an MBA, I co-founded a real manufacturing venture — Durga Foods Products — with my father. It wasn't connected to my professional career, but I learned an enormous amount, and it shaped my decision to pursue an MBA.
The opportunity
The idea started with putting small chunks of ancestral land to use. The challenge was steep: building a packaged-foods business in a category dominated by giants like Britannia and Parle, who win on economies of scale. So I looked for the gap they hadn't reached — a specific target market and price point — and a way to earn trust there.
What I did
I reached out to wholesalers and distributors to learn what our target population actually bought, liked, and would comfortably pay. We tasted samples ourselves and worked with a state-level food-processing lab to reverse-engineer flavors to local taste. We landed on three biscuit varieties — one of which, a sweet-and-salty “krack-n-krack,” became a genuine hit. Family connections in manufacturing helped us stand up a small plant on land with direct road access for easy transport, and to hire and train the people to run the machines. Setting up distribution to reach a remote target population was its own puzzle.
What I learned
Nearly every PM muscle I use today got an early workout here: operations and logistics, people management, competitive intelligence, financial management, and sales and marketing — plus the humility to know what I couldn't do alone. Bringing in the right partner wasn't just risk-sharing against established giants; it brought a different perspective to every problem. It was, in the truest sense, a startup education.