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When Rishi Israni and Pranoti Nagarkar Realised Just How Difficult It Was to Make Roti, They Set Out to Automate the Process. More Than a Decade Later, They’ve Seen Their Humble Zimplistic Rotimatic Evolve Into a Global Sensation.

- Jordan Murray

”Roti, the traditional Indian flatbread, doesn’t look all that difficult to make. Zimplistic Co-CEOs and Founders Rishi Israni (pictured left) and Pranoti Nagarkar, the husband-and-wife duo behind the Rotimatic, would disagree.

“The first memory I have of roti is when my mother would make it,” says Pranoti. “We’d ask every day for her to come, sit down and have dinner with us, but she’d be tucked away making hot roti because she’d insist it’s best when it’s straight from the pan.” Feeding her kids a “fresh and warm roti” was a way for her mother to show affection, Pranoti says. Because she spent so much time making it, though, she rarely got the chance to sit and eat with her children.

“I remember trying to make it as a child,” Rishi recalls, “and realising it wasn’t an easy thing, but something that was difficult to do.”

Indeed, making roti can be taxing. Starting with whole-wheat flour and water and mixing it into a dough, the batch is kneaded into a circular shape and left for about 10 minutes before being rolled out into individual rounds. Rishi says it can take more than half an hour to make a family-sized serving.

“We eat it with our lunch and dinner, and our son has eaten it since he’s had teeth,” he says. “As our lifestyles became busier, though, we started making it less because it was so tedious.

We’d eat more rice or supermarket roti, which is not as nutritious.”