Some of the biggest opportunities in food may not lie in creating something entirely new, but in rethinking what millions of people already eat every day.
That is the idea behind Nook Pantry, founded by Sudheera Polavarupu and Rukmini Vaidya. The brand is looking at familiar Indian staples through a different lens, focusing on nutrition, ingredient functionality and how everyday foods can be improved without asking consumers to change the way they cook or eat.
In this edition of The Untapped 30, Sudheera and Rukmini talk about why they chose to reinvent everyday staples, the gap between nutrition claims and what actually reaches the plate, their approach to protein quality and bioavailability, what they are learning from consumers, and why India’s traditional fermented foods could represent a largely untapped opportunity.
1. Nook Pantry isn’t just selling products; you are reimagining what belongs in an Indian pantry. What inspired that vision?
We got here from two different directions. One of us spent over a decade buying for retail and watched Atta go through wave after wave of reinvention: multigrain, multi-millet, protein-fortified, new versions launching every year while Besan sat untouched for decades. The other was already deep in food formulation and kept noticing the same thing each time. Most of that reinvention was happening on the label, not in the nutrition. Adding five grains to a pack doesn’t automatically mean your body absorbs more from them. Sprouting a single grain properly can do more for actual bioavailability than a longer ingredient list ever will.
So before we built anything, we did our own sense check on what genuinely moves the needle nutritionally versus what just reads well on packaging. Most staples on shelves today are engineered for shelf appeal: more grains, more claims, more surface level “superfood” language. We wanted the opposite. Whole foods first and every ingredient earning its place through what it actually does, not how it looks on a pack. That sense check is really what Nook Pantry is. Not a new staple, but the existing ones held to a higher, more honest standard.
2. Most food startups chase trends, but you chose to reinvent everyday staples. Why did you believe that was the bigger opportunity?
Trends get attention for a season. Staples get eaten every single day, in every kitchen, without anyone needing convincing to keep buying them. If you can genuinely improve something people already trust and already buy every month, you are not creating new demand, you are earning the right to be their choice. That’s a much bigger lever, because you are changing what is actually on the plate daily, not occasionally.
So instead of chasing a new hero ingredient, we went after protein quality and completeness. Did the amino acid profile actually cover all nine essentials? Was there any real omega-3 presence, which most Indian flours simply do not have? We applied supplement-grade formulation standards, not to turn flour into a supplement, but to bring that same rigor into something you already cook with every day, so the nutrition lives in your regular meal, not in a separate pill or shake on the side.
3. What consumer need or market gap did you identify that others were overlooking?
Oils, snacks, protein foods have all been reinvented in the last five years and Atta saw its share too, multigrain, multi-millet, protein-fortified versions launching every year. Besan hasn’t moved at all, it still looks identical whether you are at a kirana store or a premium outlet. And even where atta changed, most of it happened on the label, not the nutrition.
The deeper problem is that even when goodness is added to a flour, it rarely shows up where it matters, on the actual nutrition panel. Ingredients get added in quantities too small to count, antinutrients go unaddressed so the body can’t absorb what’s there, and some blends load so much fibre or protein at once that it just causes discomfort. None of that reflects how an Indian plate works, where protein already comes from dal, yoghurt, paneer through the day, where nutrition science is fairly clear that protein is better used by the body spread across three or four meals, not delivered in one large hit.
We built for that instead. Both blends draw protein from various plant sources for a genuinely complete amino acid profile and our Atta carries plant based Omega-3. We cold-mill ingredients like Sprouted Ragi, since sprouting and cold-milling preserve nutrients that heat and processing usually strip away, so what’s on the label is closer to what the body can use. Nothing about how you cook with it changes, no new technique, no different taste, no adjustment to your existing recipes. The goal was for the improvement to sit quietly inside a staple you already trust, not ask you to change a single habit to get there.
4. Building a pantry brand means changing long-standing consumer habits. What has been your biggest challenge, and what has surprised you the most on this journey?
Honestly, the hardest part has been restraint. We know the formulation side in a lot of depth, and the temptation is always to explain all of it. But if something doesn’t fit into one plain sentence on the pack, it doesn’t go on the pack. What’s surprised us is that our community doesn’t want less detail, they want more, just not diluted or dressed up. People ask us for the lab report before they ask for a discount.
5. How do you decide which products deserve to be reinvented next, and what role does customer feedback play in that process?
We start with one question: what’s genuinely missing from a staple nutritionally, not what sounds good on a label. A staple eaten at every meal is a better nutrient-delivery vehicle than a single fortified product eaten once a day, since the improvement compounds instead of relying on one big hit. So high meal-frequency staples go first.
Customer feedback plays a real role here, it tells us which staple people are most curious about and often surfaces the exact gap we should solve for next. What doesn’t move is the formulation bar, once we know what to build, it still has to earn its place through testing before it becomes a product.
6. Looking at India’s food and nutrition landscape, what opportunity do you believe remains largely untapped?
There’s still a huge amount of scope in regional and traditional fermented staples specifically. India has centuries of food wisdom in what gets soaked, sprouted or fermented before it reaches the plate and that wisdom varies hugely by region, what one part of the country ferments and eats daily is barely known two states away. Very little of it has actually been researched or verified at scale, we know it works because it’s been passed down, not because anyone’s measured why or by how much.
That’s the real opportunity, closing the gap between generations of traditional knowledge and actual lab-backed proof. It needs a lot more research than any single brand can do alone, but that’s exactly why it’s worth doing properly rather than skipping to the next trend.
7. What advice would you give founders who are trying to create a new category instead of competing in an existing one?
Don’t lead with a bigger claim, lead with one you are actually willing to test and put a number on. We have all seen how many food and health brands have been pulled up recently for claims that didn’t hold up to scrutiny, numbers that were inflated, or ingredients present in quantities too small to matter. That’s the risk of leading with a bold line before doing the work to back it.
The harder, rarer thing is choosing a specific, checkable claim and being willing to publish what the test actually says, even if the result is more modest than what would sound impressive. Most brands avoid this by keeping their claims vague enough that no one can ever hold them to it. If you are building a new category, that discipline is what actually earns belief, not the size of the claim, but your willingness to let people verify it.
8. Finally, our signature question: If we interview you again in 2030, what headline do you hope people are writing about Nook Pantry?
“The staple brand that proved better food didn’t need to ask anyone to change how they eat.”
