AIM Entrepreneur Series - Parth Birendra (MBA 2015) & Apurva Anand (MBA 2012).

AIM Entrepreneur Series

FAIM and AIMAAI’s AIM Entrepreneur series commenced today with the first episode featuring Parth Birendra (Cohort 10, MBA 2015) Cofounder at Happy Nature and Apurva Anand (Cohort 7, MBA 2012) Cofounder at Forbidden foods. The session was moderated by (George Koovor MBM 93) SVP at Pepsico

Apurva Anand’s Journey:

Post AIM, Apurva launched one of the first ‘Cloud Kitchen’ focussed on healthy food. Later he joined Hector Beverages as head of sales & operations and was instrumental in the success of the beverage brand ‘Paper Boat’. During demonetization in India, he was joined Mobikwik as Director of India Retail Operations. He then went on to work with Coca-Cola to introduce and setup operations for the company’s global premium portfolio in India.

After a decade of exposure to technology and retail domain, he co-founded Forbidden Foods.

His learnings from the entrepreneurial journey:
- Solving problems vs knowing what to solve- Planning for Success - Most founders plan for a failure but for a company to scale it is important to plan for success.

What inspired him to take up the initiative?
1. Seeing how companies today achieve global scale in a short span of time, he wanted to take up the challenge of building a global brand in a short time.
2. Infrastructure available today are conducive to entrepreneurs

How do you evaluate a business idea before taking it up?

- Industry size
- Growth of a sub segment
- Right set Cofounders.

Past Experience help? : His past experience gave him the exposure to prioritise the problems to solve

Importance of funding - Secured funds pre revenue and it helped them grow and survive the challenging times.

How do you see competition: Learn from competition and find opportunity in the market.

Advice to aspiring entrepreneurs?: Form a team that believes in the idea. This gives an initial validation to your idea and motivates you to go ahead.

MBA required to become an Entrepreneur?: It depends. Timing is critical for the entrepreneur than an MBA. If there is a great idea and the market is ready it is better to go ahead and do it.
Parth Birendra’s Journey: Parth began his career as an Engineer and Post AIM he has worked as a management consultant with E&Y India, Accenture Philippines and PwC.

He Identified the opportunity in the Milk segment when he learned that it sector is 70% unorganised in India. He started Happy Moo with the goal of organising the segment and deliver quality to people.
Started on Day 0 at 4:00 AM with 24 litres of milk and scaled to 2000 L/ day by Jan 2020. Currently, they have a portfolio of 10 products.
Coming from a corporate background to the segment that needs to employ and motivate a different kind of team they were a lot of challenges for his team.

Secret of his success: Listening to the customers. There are 3 responses to a product can be Yes, No and WOW!

The team AIM’s at WOW
- Focus on the quality that enabled them to build trust with the customers.
- Customer delight through customer redressal framework

As next steps, Happy Nature will focus on scaling to Tier 2 cities and expanding their product line:

How did you manage the complexity of managing Supply chain while managing trust?:

- Order only a day in advance to ensure - Farm fresh
- Strict Vendors selection
- Travel to far out villages to find teams that deliver a quality product

How did this idea come to you?: Research on various industries helped them identify this one. Later they Invested time in building the Logistics, Supply chain, delivery etc. Milk got them food in the door they expanded product lines to Breakfast basket involving bread and other quality products.

Why Milk? : A report said there is currently 60% adulteration in this segment. Hence they took it up to bring quality.

How did Past Experience help? : Consulting gave Parth the background of different industries and helped him decide what will work and not work.

How did you break out of the Comfort of corporate? : Family support helped them start. They bootstrapped through the initial years to build the foundation. Until the merger, they were self-funded and the merger helped them gain the resources to scale further.

How do you handle the competition? Premium milk segment is currently unorganised with only a few players today.


Advice to aspiring entrepreneurs?: Plan what you want to do for the next 5-10 years and ensure the journey aligns with what you really want to do.

MBA required to become an Entrepreneur? : MBA gave the foundation and helped plan risks in advance.