Being hailed as the Street Food Capital of India; what better way can the Indore’s entrepreneurs connect to especially to the theme related to Food? Indore city on 29th July, witnessed the RoundTable Meet hosted by eChai Ventures in association with Café Terazza as venue partner and Bingage Coupons as the Goodies partner. All the participants who attended the meet were novice who wanted to foray in the food and beverage segment.

eChai already has ongoing weekly #UXMorning programs in association with Wow Communications and Uber – and now will be hosting weekly#eChaiRoundTable programs also. 

eChai RoundTables are theme-based/sector specific knowledge sharing programs i.e. Agriculture, Cleantech, Healthcare, Internet of Things, Food & Beverages, Sports, Media & Entertainment, Education, Arts & Culture, SMAC & many others. eChai Ventures hosted the RoundTable on the Theme of Food & Beverages, whereby the Entrepreneurs who had successfully built businesses around Food & Beverages shared their entrepreneurial journey, insights and perspective about industry trends followed by interactive dialogue.

(Speakers from right to left: Deepak Chawla of Cafe Terazza, Rajan Arora of ASOP Ltd and Saurabh Srivastava of Mangosteen and Goodies partner, Gaurav Padiyar of Bingage)

A panel of 3 speakers flagged off the meet starting with Deepak Chawla of Café Terazza, who dons many hats; being a photographer and arts enthusiast apart from being a Café owner talked about his journey from Café Palette to Café Terazza. His journey peppered with new experiences each day was really motivating.

The second speaker was not from Indore but has made Indore his operations base for a long time. Rajan Arora who is Director of(Operations) in ASOP Ltd, is the biggest commodity vendor partner of Walmart in India. His Brand, A-Plus deals in pulses, spices, tea, rice, flour and other primary foods. Rajan’s struggles in establishing his operations in different cities in India made us realize how long drawn the process of supplying the primary food is.

The last and the youngest entrepreneur in the panel of speaker was Saurabh Srivastav of Mangosteen. Being an entrepreneur, traveller and explorer Saurabh has lived life on the edge, choosing and experimenting with interests in the 4 long year stint with Mangosteen and incorporating his experiences into the café culture. According to him all his experiences were best realized in his café concept.

In the second half of the meet there was a must needed discussion on putting Indore on the International Food Map. India is world's 2nd largest food producer after China. In the coming years it will dominate the food industry worldover. The Indian food market is pegged at approx 2,50,000 crore and the value added food products comprises of 80,000 crore. Food Processing is experiencing 20% annual growth rate. In this milieu, it was interesting to have a healthy discussion and viewpoints on what shall be the future of the food & beverage market for Indore.

The meet was rounded up with a quick quiz related to food industry in Indore. Gaurav Padiyar of Bingage coupons gave away the prizes to the 3 winners.

It all summed up with an interesting meet; for the novice and aspiring entrepreneurs gained confidence in understanding how to tackle various issues related to the food/beverage industry. The insightful responses of all the speakers were amazing. This further affirms eChai’s core philosophy of #CoRise ie. together we build a strong entrepreneurship ecosystem by sharing our journey in entrepreneurship.