Meet the Founders Behind 10 Homegrown Indian Food Brands
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Mitali Sharma
- October 28, 2026
Building a food business requires an understanding of customers, consistent quality and control over costs. Founders also need reliable supply chains and distribution to reach buyers and support growth. Here are ten Indian food entrepreneurs building homegrown brands across the food and beverage sector.
1. Aditi Handa — The Baker’s Dozen
Aditi Handa’s path to food entrepreneurship began with a venture outside the kitchen. In an interview, she recalled running a merchandise store at IIM Ahmedabad before a stay in Canada introduced her to commercial cooking through an internship. She went on to train at the International Culinary Centre in New York and Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. Handa co-founded The Baker’s Dozen with Sneh Jain in Mumbai in 2013. As head baker, she has remained involved in the craft behind the business. Her transition brought together formal training, practical kitchen experience and an early ambition to run her own enterprise.
2. Nishant Sinha — Roastery Coffee House
Nishant Sinha began his coffee career as a barista after studying hospitality at the Institute of Hotel Management in Jodhpur. He has traced his entry into the industry to a teacher’s suggestion that he explore Indian coffee. In 2017, he founded Roastery Coffee House in Hyderabad’s Banjara Hills. The move took him from working within India’s specialty coffee industry to running a café business of his own. His work has involved sourcing, roasting and developing café spaces. In 2024, Roastery opened its first international outlet in Helsinki, adding an overseas operation to the café business he had built in India.
3. Snigdha Manchanda — Tea Trunk
Snigdha Manchanda’s interest in tea began as a collection of gifts brought home by travelling friends and relatives. As the collection grew, she wanted to understand what she was drinking. In 2011, she attended a professional tea school in Sri Lanka, studying under Japanese tea master Nao Kumekawa. She founded Tea Trunk in 2013, turning that interest and training into a business built around sourcing and blending tea. Her work also includes teaching tea appreciation. Manchanda’s founding story centres on the years spent learning to taste, identify and evaluate teas before building a company around that knowledge and sharing it.
4. Parth Derai — Blissnack
Parth Derai is building Blissnack from Godhra in Gujarat, with an emphasis on establishing a consumer business outside India’s larger startup centres. He previously worked at his family’s President Group, which operates dealerships in Gujarat. With no prior FMCG experience, he is learning about manufacturing, packaging and distribution through trial and error. His priority for the protein snack business is taste. Derai documents the process on Instagram, sharing failures alongside progress. Blissnack remains at an early stage. His next challenge is to build a distribution network and secure shelf space beyond Gujarat while establishing the brand in a competitive market.
5. Dinika Bhatia — Nutty Gritties
Dinika Bhatia began developing Nutty Gritties while studying entrepreneurship and strategic management at the University of Southern California. The idea formed part of a university business-plan project, and she started working on the venture in 2009. She comes from a family with several generations of experience in the dry-fruit trade. At parent company DRB Foods, family members have taken on finance, creative and marketing responsibilities alongside her leadership. Bhatia has also undertaken management and leadership programmes. Her founding journey combines an idea developed at university with the experience and support of a family enterprise and its knowledge of the trade.
6. Sanjana Patel — La Folie
Sanjana Patel co-founded La Folie with her husband, Parthesh Patel, in Mumbai in 2014, following professional training and experience in French pastry kitchens. She studied at École Grégoire Ferrandi in Paris and apprenticed with Pierre Hermé. Her subsequent work at La Folie expanded from pastry and chocolate creations into making chocolate directly from cacao beans. According to her company biography, that shift involved visits to cacao farms across four continents. Patel leads creative direction and the kitchen, while her co-founder oversees business development and sales. The company also runs a culinary studio and factory tours to explain its chocolate-making process.
7. Bani Nanda — Miam Patisserie
Bani Nanda moved from a physics degree to professional pastry training at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. Her company’s founding account also recalls her experience at Parisian pâtisserie Dalloyau. She started Miam in Delhi in 2015, working from a converted room with a single oven. Akshay Handa joined the business in 2018 to lead operations and business development, according to Miam’s account. Nanda has continued to shape its creative work as the organisation has expanded across Delhi-NCR. The company describes its growth as self-funded and gradual, with an emphasis on building its team and opening kitchens at a manageable pace.
8. Deepak Sabharwal — Earthy Tales
Deepak Sabharwal’s move into entrepreneurship followed a corporate career spanning roughly two decades at companies including Timex, PepsiCo and GE. A cost and works accountant with an MBA, he began farming on his family’s land in Pushkar, Rajasthan, in 2012. For nearly four years, he combined a weekday corporate job with weekends spent experimenting on the farm. He subsequently co-founded Earthy Tales, which began in 2017. His responsibilities grew from learning cultivation himself to building relationships between farmers and consumers. The company’s account describes his decision to leave corporate employment as the outcome of years of practical involvement in agriculture.
9. Apeksha Jain — The Gourmet Jar
Apeksha Jain’s business began with a food memory from a holiday in Burgundy, France, in 2009. After returning to India, she tried recreating a banana jam she had tasted there. She was running a food blog at the time, and kitchen experiments drew interest from friends and family. That response encouraged her to establish The Gourmet Jar from her home kitchen in 2012. Jain’s professional background also includes teaching French. Her move into entrepreneurship developed through experimentation and responding to interest within her circle. The company has since built a production team, with women involved in preparing its small batches.
10. Aditya Sanghavi — Snackible
Aditya Sanghavi founded Snackible in Mumbai in May 2015 after working at consulting firm Themis. A Cardiff University graduate, he developed the idea after noticing his colleagues’ snacking habits at work. His time in the UK had introduced him to subscription services, which influenced the company’s early business model. Sanghavi assembled a team across marketing, sales, operations and food innovation, while working with specialists on development and quality checks. In an early interview, he described using website behaviour data to understand customers and improve operations. His transition into entrepreneurship involved learning to manage sourcing, manufacturing relationships and distribution alongside sales.
