A school meal venture to provide nutritious, vegetarian food

A school meal venture to provide nutritious, vegetarian food:

BENGALURU: Three classmates from a Stanford programme on innovation & entrepreneurship have come together to launch a school meal venture aiming to provide nutritious and tasty vegetarian food to children studying in some of the top schools of Bengaluru.

"Our research has shown that most children between five and 17 years are undernourished for want of right intake of proteins and nutrients. This is the area where we want to serve and set benchmarks," said Kishore Acharya, cofounder of the Bengaluru-based foodtech startup, sCoolMeal Food Ventures. California-based angel investor has backed their venture, and the team has set up a modern kitchen in south Bengaluru. The trio have tied up with Avon Facility Management Services, an arm of Quess Corp, to cook and maintain its kitchen.

"The idea was incubated at the Stanford Ignite programme last year. The purpose was to solve one of the major problems working parents faced in not being able to provide nutritious food to their school-going children," said Acharya.

There are about 450 ICSE and CBSE schools in Bengaluru, and experts see this as a new idea aimed at solving a real problem. "There is clearly a market for such a product," said YLR Moorthy, professor of marketing at IIMB. But the challenge, according to him, is in making the food acceptable to children. "Children eat junk food because it is tasty. If a food venture is able to crack the taste part, then it will be a success," he added.

To begin with, sCoolMeal is working with a few schools, and plans to kick off with about 2,000 meals a day and touch about 10,000 in the next 18 months.