85 per cent of India is protein-deficient: Dhruv Bhushan

Shahid Akhter, editor, ETHealthworld spoke to Dhruv Bhushan, founder and CEO of Habbit, New Delhi, to get his views on nutritional challenges confronting us and the tech led solution that he advocates.

Health Food Market Challenges
One of the biggest challenges when it comes to health is that all conversations around health are about exercising first. What that means is everyone thinks that to be healthy you first need to exercise. Unfortunately, that is not the ideal situation. If you talk to any doctor, trainer, or nutritionist, for being healthy you first bring nutrition into the forefront. The second challenge that is currently happening is the path-breaking innovation and use of technology that is happening all over the world, currently not being adopted in India to take this message of proper nutrition and take the right foods and products to the population.

Health Food : Market Trends
I am a first-generation serial entrepreneur and I love solving problems. The biggest challenge that was staring us in the face was health and nutrition. There was a time when I was more than 172 kilograms and it is that transformation which has showed me the importance of nutrition in leading a healthy life. So during this transformation, we saw multiple problems within the nutrition market in India specifically being that modern lifestyles are making us very unhealthy. Modern diets, modern foods, which are essentially processed foods with lots of sugar. People's awareness around eating healthy food and being fit has increased. Unfortunately, the right solutions were not available. We will help people build positive lifestyle habits within healthcare and also help them remove their negative habits using our proprietary foods, proprietary ingredients and all of it by combining taste with health.

USP of HABBIT
Our wide portfolio of foods includes chocolates, desserts, ice-creams to drinks that put our health first and taste first, they will be available everywhere you go and our technology will help you customize them to your own personal needs thus making it much more enjoyable and accessible for you.

HABBIT Proprietary Technology & Science
We look at technology and science in two different manners. First of all, within products itself, if you look at the western economies, lots of path-breaking innovation and research has happened on natural proprietary ingredients which can remove the bad things in food. For example, there are proprietary proteins that we've come up with which can remove sugar in lots and lots of your foods which are fully natural and safe and this gives you amazing taste. As a company we've been doing research and product development while speaking to thousands of people and ensuring that tastes are suitable.

That is how the science part comes in within product development, the modern technologies of building personalized solutions using a lot of artificial intelligence, building subscription models, wherein you just have to allow us once and tell us information as to what all you need and we'll be able to continuously give it to them and building network effects loyalty within our model.

Team Behind HABBIT
While Habbit started as a vision out of a personal passion, it has been joined by the best of people. So the kind of team that is working on solving this big problem and going after the multi-billion dollar opportunity is comprised of someone who's built the biggest consumer brands in the country, a girl who has led massive expansion of some of the top startups in country, a material scientist and nutrition mix which is a rare breed because we are science and taste at the time. So it's about the people behind the company which is working together to build a massive startup, which is rapidly scalable.

Launch Plans & Vision
So after over three years of research and having perfected our formulations and products with over 5,000 people, we're fortunate that our products are now ready and we are about to launch in the market in the month of April. Our vision and ambition is to build the biggest tech-led food company in the world. Lots and lots of global Investors and VCs are backing us. We will be quickly dominating the Delhi-NCR market with our foods which are suitable for everyone's taste first. Our vision is that within three to five years, we are a pan India company attaining at least a billion dollars in sales within six to seven years. That is what we are hoping to do. We are working on a very large problem, 85 per cent of India is protein-deficient and using our products, we want to be there solving this problem for India and in the process building a massively scalable lifestyle brand of the same.