How FarmDidi Is Changing Lives

Each bottle of pickle that leaves FarmDidi, headed to a consumer, has a little kahani behind it -- it's linked to the tale of a life, the life of a simple, striving village woman who created it, and that's what gives Manjari Sharma satisfaction and happiness.

Give village women in Maharashtra an opportunity to earn and every month, with just Rs 5,000 or Rs 10,000 extra in their pocket as a result, there is so much they can achieve. That sum can improve their and their family's lives significantly.

For instance, Janisha, who lives in Walwati, Shrivardhan taluka, Raigad district, was able to send her children to school for the first time.

Sangita (named changed), also living in a place that is barely a dot on the map, bought a little gold for her daughter. Something she had never been able to do before. She bought the young girl a pair of earrings.

Manisha, living in Shivri village, Purandar taluka, Pune district, could put her son in a better school in Kolhapur.

Women, who had finally discovered a way to bring in an income, found they could do so much with this bonanza of cash, that might appear small to us, but was a rather large and useful amount for them. And these women, who were thrifty, invariably invested it back in the family.

"Imagine some women don't even own any assets. They bought, assets for the first time," explains Manjari Sharma.

Sangita, Manisha, Janisha are all Didis, who make and supply pickle, from their village homes all over Maharashtra, to FarmDidi, a tech-lead food startup based out of Manjri village, near Hadapsar, Pune, of which Manjari Sharma, 36, is the founder, Chief Didi and partner, along with her husband Anukrit Johari and Asmita Ghodeshwar.

FarmDidi then goes ahead and markets and sells the pickles via its Web site www.farmdidi.com.

Winning Rs 1 Crore On Shark Tank

The network of Didis in Maharashtra, making pickles and chutneys for FarmDidi or who have received assistance from the company, number 2,000 today and the innovative venture received a notable boost when in early 2024 on Season 3 of Shark Tank, two sharks, or angel investors, agreed to invest Rs 1 crore for 10 per cent equity.

Manjari's valiant goal is to eventually have one million Didis, by 2031 or so, manufacturing pickles and other food products for FarmDidi and thus will be -- extraordinarily satisfyingly for Manjari, if she succeeds -- creating livelihoods and financially empowering a sizeable chunk of village women in India.

Why pickles?

Why Didis?

Why Maharashtra?

Why the urge to empower women?

Why Manjari?

How The FarmDidi Story Began...

The Manjari Story began 1,414 distant kilometres from Pune in Bahadurgarh, in Jhajjar district of eastern Haryana, and took her to New Delhi, Pune, Kolkata, Patna, Begusarai (east of Patna in Bihar), Khagaria (also east of Patna in Bihar), Bengaluru, Gurugram and finally back to Pune again.

A native of this small town in the NCR region, where her father was in the construction business, Manjari already showed sign of leadership when she graduated from Bal Bharti School as a house captain and was taking part in inter-school debates at a regional level.

She vaguely contemplated a career with the Indian Administrative Services, with encouragement from her father, but was uncertain if she should put in the enormous time required to study for it or if she could weather the toll the preparation takes.

"My father always said that wherever you go you will either earn money or a lot of respect. So, you have to choose."

After completing a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Ramjas College, Delhi, Manjari found a job with Infosys in Pune as a system engineer.

She had worked for nearly four years with Infosys, and then two years for Wipro, when she decided to do her MBA and got admission at the prestigious Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta in 2014.

Study at IIMC was an eventful two years for Manjari. At the institute she got to know fellow student and future husband Anukrit Johari, who was a Dilliwallah with roots in Noida, Uttar Pradesh.

Sports was another love that kept her busy at IIMC -- cricket, basketball, futsal. "I played a lot of sports. We were very active sports people in college and that's how I know him (Anukrit)."

In August 2015 the office of then (and now) chief minister Nitish Kumar organised a competition and invited students from several graduate schools across India, including a team from IIMC, to come to Bihar to have a look at various development areas in the state -- health, education, women empowerment -- and suggest solutions.

Manjari's area of study was women's empowerment and over a period of 15 days she had a chance to meet bunches of colourful rural ladies in Begusarai and Khagaria.

"Wherever I went, I met a lot of didis. They call them didis -- I came across self-help group (SHG) women for the first time. You'd be surprised that in India there are more than 90 million SHGs," Manjari tells Vaihayasi Pande Daniel/Rediff.com.

Meeting those women was a completely life-altering moment for Manjari.

'What else we can do so we can also contribute to the family income?'

She was startled to discover that many villages in Bihar had all but been emptied of their menfolk, who were away in the cities working.

The women who remained in the villages to mind the home and fields, felt their left-behind-ness acutely and were a restless, impatient lot, aspiring to do anything to augment the earnings coming into the home.

"There were a lot of villages where only women were there. So, I could see the feminisation of agriculture. Women were taking care of agricultural activities, even while they were taking care of their families too."

But when Manjari interacted with them, the persistent, recurrent question put to her was: 'What else we can do so we can also contribute to the family income? Then I could send my children to a better school' and so on.

"While I was a student, I would give some random replies and I was very embarrassed with my answers.

"(I would suggest) You can do training... But I was very moved by their passion. They would wake up at 4 am, fetch water, take care of their families, take care of the agriculture (tasks) and produce... everything. And still they wanted to contribute more!

"We submitted our paper to the (Bihar) government and were the national winners in this research paper competition. But that stint in Bihar, I mean, it stayed with me for forever," she recalls thoughtfully and, even today, eight years later, a tad emotionally.

'I felt that life was not for me'

After she completed her MBA, Manjari joined global management consulting firm, Kearney in Gurugram.

Anukrit worked for the Tata Administrative Services, briefly, and then French oil company, TotalEnergies in Mumbai.

Her almost five-year stint with Kearney as a management consultant -- that often involved working with CXOs (chief experience officers), assisting with a new product entry or advising on business and marketing strategy, cost reduction, profitability or liaising with governments -- was both stimulating and hectic.

It took her around the globe -- "I had work across five continents" and she often made trips to the USA, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Europe, the Middle East.

For most people that would have been a dream job. But says Manjari, contemplatively: "I felt that life was not for me. I was saving millions of billions for them, but that wasn't as purposeful as helping a rural woman make a little extra, so that she can send her children to better schools. That career was not for me. It was very fancy for me, honestly.

"I wanted to see myself working in the field, making real-time impact. That question -- 'Didi hum kya aur kar sakte? (Is there something more which we can do?)' -- had stayed with me."

The stubborn quest to find The Answer

While working with Kearney, Manjari, who comes across as impassioned, serious-minded and earnestly committed to making a difference, started taking tiny chunks of time off "quick leave" -- through 2018-2019 to travel through rural Maharashtra.

She had seen a sample of what the circumstances were like for women in Bihar, near Patna, but she wished to see if that situation was mirrored in other tiny villages across the rest of the states and Maharashtra was an area she was comfortable in, because of her grasp of Marathi.

Travelling and actually getting a bit of basic, first-hand experience of the problems villagers faced and "the state of rural women" Manjari believed might help her formulate a plan for what she could do, once she left Kearney.

She had, by then, firmly resolved to work on some kind of financially viable project that would give back to village women and help them stand on their own feet.

Most importantly it hugely niggled that she still did not have a reply to the critical question that had been put to her by the hard-working, doughty women of Begusari and Khargalia.

It was her stubborn quest to find The Answer, and then, after that, help women work towards it.

'Didi loans mil jaata hai lekin marketing nahin milti hai'

The villages darshan gave her a modicum of insight into the complex issues in play, the extent of their thorniness and what kind of projects just might work.

Maharashtra, like Bihar, she found, had loads of women filled with a hunger to start their own businesses and augment earnings.

Their husbands, though often not absent, were marginal farmers struggling to eke out a living by supplementing a pitiful annual farm income of Rs 10,000 to Rs 20,000 with labour work or jobs in factories nearby. Life was extremely rough for these families.

Rural women desiring to become entrepreneurs were not lacking for loans to start a business. That, most places in India, Manjari learnt, was readily available from the government, and especially in Maharashtra.

The problem went deeper for these women and was about identifying what business would actually succeed -- what product should they make or sell.

More than that, once they picked a product, they didn't have a clue how to market it -- "Didi loans mil jaata hai lekin marketing nahin milti hai(We get loans but not marketing know-how)."

Some of the women she spoke to had, for instance, taken loans to buy cattle or papad-making machines and such like, but could not take the business further.

Manjari realised they were not equipped with key skills: How to price an item; how to grasp if they were profitable; ways to add quality or value to the item or figure its USP; not get duped while applying for licenses; have an understanding of the end consumer; or know how, vitally, to package it.

The short forays into Village Hindustan were not enough. In 2019, Manjari took longer leave from Kearney and actually took up residence, for five or six months, in the village of Gadana, Khultabad taluka, Aurangabad district, and during that period "participated in on every village meeting," spent time speaking to all the SHGs, to "really understand what was happening on the ground."

'I am so glad to have my husband as my co-founder'

Many more months of research and investigation showed her that a food business was the way to go.

Most village women had excellent cooking skills -- "the food of rural India was amazing; very tasty in the way it is prepared and it's farm to plate; and while some work had been done in the craft industry, nothing had been done in the food sector" -- and Manjari felt these edible items could possibly find a market in urban India.

Tedious, painstaking rounds of trial and error by Manjari, supported by the co-founders -- she credits her husband for making sure she never lost her resolve or became disheartened; "I am so glad to have my husband as my co-founder, and it's because of him, I have always kept going" -- proved that a marketing app for food items would not fly (ahead of its time), nor connecting the food makers directly with B2B businesses and that the women making the products needed major education in food processing.

The next task was choosing the food item. Papad? Pickle? Masala powders? Jam? Squash?

By a process of elimination, Manjari figured that pickles had to be the first product they should try. But again it wasn't that simple.

The road that a bottle of pickle must travel from a village woman's kitchen in interior Maharashtra to urban bazaars was much longer than Manjari imagined.

Pickles prepared by women in village Maharashtra were different, so fresh and quite yummy. But would they appeal to an urban palate or pan-India tastebuds? Indians living in the city preferred less salt, very little oil and nothing that spicy. Further a Maharashtrian-style pickle might not work in, say, a Chennai market.

There was also the matter of hygiene -- because most cooking in rural homes was done at floor level or outside in the open -- and ensuring no impurities got into the pickle.

And once they had the right kind pickle ready, who would buy up the batches and market them in the cities and towns?

'If I left my job at Kearney, I had to do something really big'

Manjari was startled to discover that there were no takers among distributors for a proposed quality pickle.

In a bid to make sure their pickles were competitive pricewise, distributors wanted the cheapest pickle they could get, which might have inferior oil or palm oil, adulterated ingredients, chemicals and poor-quality fruit and vegetables (ie mangoes, lemons, carrots etc).

She explains: "If you look at the data, 60 per cent of the Indian food market is unorganised. Even the Government of India, the FSSAI, which is the authority which takes care of this, is not aware of all the 25 lakh plus organisations that exist."

"Food adulteration is very common in India -- very, very, common. The distributors (we spoke to) totally said they didn't care about the quality of a pickle as long as they were able to sell it, because that's something they're selling and they were not going eat it themselves at their homes. The pickle that's available in market they are selling at (as little as) Rs 100 or Rs 120 a kg."

All the gyan she had absorbed from years of studying the dynamics of rural food manufacturing made Manjari realise there was only one way out, that "maybe I should create a brand of my own and then take care of the entire supply chain (backward integration/development too). I knew that if I left my job at Kearney and everything else, I had to do something big, like really big."

She put in her papers at Kearney in November 2020, Anukrit joined her in this venture nearly a year later, and in 2021, post the worst of the Pandemic, FarmDidi began.

Manjari received solid support from Asmita Ghodeshwar, who she says is a friend and like an elder sister, and credits Anukrit, who was onboard with Manjari's ideas, and in sync with her zeal, since IIMC days, for the big final push.

"He was the one who believed in it. He wanted to get it off the ground. He was the one who got it started. The first sale came when he was around."

The Didis received training in hygiene

Manjari and her partners streamlined a special process by which pickles would be made for FarmDidi.

They would supply the ingredients or premixes as per a formula which had been worked out, based on inputs from the Didis too, that they felt matched typical Indian consumer preferences.

Suppliers of fruits/vegetables that the Didis would coordinate with, had been chosen too.

The 30 Didis, who had been carefully selected to join FarmDidi, would come to the Pune headquarters to receive training, especially "rigorously" in hygiene, the use of gloves, masks and hair nets.

When they returned, they would set up their own pickle or masala kitchen and establish a routine whereby they would touch base with Pune every morning to show, via daily pictures, that they were following the established FarmDidi SOPs, that ensured quality, uniformity and cleanliness. Audits were performed regularly too.

'There are a lot of Didis in the pipeline'

The years of meticulous research paid off, as both the concept and its translation to reality proved fruitful and the word of its success started spreading in rural circles.

"That's why people are joining -- there are a lot of Didis in the pipeline, who want to start working with us." The business model they have employed guarantees that "five to 10 percent of the sale of every product goes to the Didis."

Every month or two FarmDidi adds a few new Didis and the founder team was/is constantly on the move scouting new areas, new products and armies of new Didis, with Asmita handling the Didis, food R&D and technology building, while "I take care of the branding and marketing, online sales. The growth part is also handled by me, like how many more Didis do we want."

Anukrit takes care of the entire sales operation. The team at the Hadapsar headquarters has also expanded to 25 plus.

India has many small-scale cooperatives creating a variety of food products and plenty of rural factories producing pickles, so what sets FarmDidi apart? "We are creating homemade, handmade food. It's perfectly homemade, quality measures have been deployed and the quality of ingredients is really good. No chemicals or preservatives, so that the essence of rural food comes alive for the customer. We've made sure that the food is of a certain hygienic standard. And on top of that, of course, this pickle is empowering rural women."

They plan to soon automate the process such that by scanning the QR code on a bottle of FarmDidi pickle, the consumer will know which Didi put together the pickle and details of the lab test reports, kitchen hygiene and pictures of the actual process.

Each bottle of pickle that leaves FarmDidi, headed to a consumer, has a little kahani behind it -- it's linked to the tale of a life, the life of a simple, striving village woman who created it, and that's what gives Manjari satisfaction and happiness.

She feels a sense of contentment with "the impact that we are creating through the women who are becoming food entrepreneurs. Every day we hear a lot of stories. Their stories are very remarkable. Amazing. Every day is an inspiration. I feel I have more purpose in my life now."

Her 'Mission to Empower 1 Million Rural Women' is on track. As a FarmDidi champion Abhishek Vijayvergiya put it: 'This achar business is taking on the stark inequality of India -- one bottle at a time.'

Feature Presentation: Rajesh Alva/Rediff.com