A BUSINESS OF HER OWN

IIM Bangalore's business incubator, NSRCEL, has been supporting women entrepreneurs. Meet some of the business owners and their ventures.

- Pritha Roy Choudhury

ProMeat 'chicken nuggets' and chicken sausages' taste like chicken and have the same P texture but are actually plantbased. The brand was founded in 2021 by Pranjuli Garg, then a B.Tech student of National Institute of Food Technology Entrepreneurship and Management (NIFTM) Sonipat and her friend, Debabrata Das.

The duo started exploring the "smart protein space" in 2018, attending events and learning as much as they could. "At that time, the smart protein space was booming in the USA and Europe and there was a lot of traction," said Garg. She developed her products, experimenting at home and testing on family and friends, before winning the prize money from the India Smart Protein Innovation Challenge in December 2020. The Rs.1 lakh they won allowed them to register their company, ProPlant Foods Pvt Ltd, with the brand ProMeat, in March 2021. Following that, they worked on developing their products, refining quality and adding variety.

Despite a soft-launch' in August 2022, the nascent business still needed all the help it could get. Its founders needed to know what audience to target, what demands existed. In November, ProPlant Foods became a part of NSRCEL, Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bangalore's start-up incubation centre. NSRCEL has two programmes focusing on women - the Women Startup Programme and Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women. "More than 620 women entrepreneurs have incubated their ventures at NSRCEL of IIM Bangalore," said Anand Sri Ganesh, chief operating officer of NSRCEL.

Garg's venture found support here as did Geeta Barad's. From Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Gandhinagar, Barad had started a venture producing cloth-based sanitary napkins and is working on a mobile application to help women dealing with gynaecological problems.

Prototype and pandemic