Spreading butter on bread can be messy, especially for children. PC Musthafa saw his young son one day struggle with this. But he had also noticed that the boy could apply glue on paper with ease. That’s when the ID Fresh Food co-founder felt a marriage of design principles was possible here – a glue stick-like butter stick. They worked on it, and launched it recently. You just need to keep the butter stick outside the refrigerator for some time to soften the butter, then remove the top lid and twist the bottom knob clockwise. The butter flows out of the tiny holes at the bottom, allowing you to spread it evenly. The stick is refillable.
The first lot has been sold out, says chief marketing officer Rahul Gandhi.
Engineering innovative products like these, as also information technology (IT), have been core to the success of the company, founded 18 years ago and whose products are now widely available across India, West Asia and the US. “ID runs on IT,” says Musthafa, adding that entrepreneurship must be about discovering a new way of doing things. Listening to customers, he says, is also crucial. “We recently gave iPhones to customers who helped us identify the biggest problems with our products,” he adds.
The company’s best-known design innovation is its idli/dosa batter packaging. It’s a zip-lock package which, when opened, becomes a vessel that can be stored in the refrigerator. It also solved the problem of contamination that would happen when lying on store shelves.
Then there’s the easy-to-use coffee decoction standee pouch, with a specially designed nozzle that pours the right quantity of the freshly brewed liquid. And there’s the vada batter package that has a nozzle with a cutter that allows you to squeeze gently and get a perfect-sized ring.
For batter production, the focus has been to achieve the quality of the stone wet grinder, but with the scale of modern machinery. Musthafa says Germans are the most innovative in food processing, but they don’t eat idli/dosa. So, his team went to Germany, and brought from there a mustard-making machine. Unlike mustard, batter requires blades capable of finely grinding particles to achieve a perfect, smooth consistency. “To achieve that, we employed a process of customising the blades through various permutations and combinations,” Musthafa says.
Similarly, for ID’s popular ready-to-heat Malabar parotta, the company adapted a pastry-making machine from Greece. “We used thin sheet making technology. And then our in-house team played a pivotal role in developing the methods for layer-making and spindling,” Musthafa says.
Accurate demand forecasting
IT and digital technologies have been central to supply chain management. In the early days, a very high proportion of its perishable products would be wasted because of lack of demand prediction capabilities. Today, wastage is less than 1%, thanks to algorithms that make demand forecasting highly accurate for each day and product.
Sujeeth Ravindran, chief technology officer, says that for a product that uses no preservatives, needs to be delivered fresh, and for which wastage needs to be kept to a minimum, a traditional distribution system does not work. “We have put all the tech components in place to move from an instinct-driven business to a data-driven one,” he says. ID Fresh, he says, was among the first of the new-age consumer enterprises to implement Salesforce automation systems and ERP. “This gave us shop-level and day-level transaction details, and this data is now helping us efficiently plan sourcing, production, and distribution,” he says.
The distribution centres do not even have storage. “The supply chain is a zero inventory model. And that’s a big achievement,” says Musthafa, who did computer science from NIT Calicut, worked at Manhattan Associates, Motorola and Citibank, and then did the MBA programme at IIM Bangalore, during which the idea of starting an idli/dosa batter business emerged.
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New innovation team
Efforts are now on to accelerate innovation. Till now, innovations were largely driven by Musthafa, and somewhat ad hoc. The company is now setting up a separate team of 6-7 people for new product development and innovation. The team will be led by Enakshi Dasgupta, who has spent 15 years in the FMCG industry, in organisations such as Grupo Bimbo (Modern Foods), Avon, and Godfrey Phillips. ID, Musthafa says, doesn’t simply see itself as a food company. “We are an organisation driven by a noble purpose – to offer nourishing food solutions free from chemicals and preservatives, making life easier for all while promoting healthier eating habits.”
