Purple Kaddu – A Guide to Healthy Eating

PurpleKaddu.com is a portal that reviews and rates packaged food on nutritional aspects. This product rating helps users make choosing food simple as the higher the rating better is the nutritional quotient and the reviews help them understand the “Good” and “Bad” of the food. In short this is your best guide to achieving your health and nutritional goals.

My co founders and I started this venture in 2014. Here’s the story about how we got together and started the venture.

After having worked in IT industry with most for global banking software company, I joined the founding team of tax portal – Taxsmile.com in the year 2006 taking on the responsibility for product development and technology. It was while working at Taxsmile.com that I met Sangeeta and Saurabh – co founders for Purple Kaddu. Sangeeta was responsible for customer support and Saurabh was part of the technology team. We moved into different roles as we continued to be part of Taxsmile.com. I took on the business responsibility whereas Sangeeta moved on take responsibility for Corportate Customer Acquisition, Support & Operations and Saurabh managed the technology for the Taxsmile products.
In April 2013, I decided to take a break to do things I always wanted to do, which included yoga, and take charge of my health. During this phase I became particular about the package food that was purchased for home. We used to pick up “Ragi” biscuits and encourage my son to have it thinking he will get the right nutrition. On picking up the Ragi biscuit from a popular brand I realized that it contained “sugar free” and hence not meant for children as is also specified on the packet fine print.

After this incident I did little research and found that usually there is a devil in the fine print and it is important to dive deep to understand all the ingredients and nutritional facts without getting swayed by the keywords on the label.

I also realized that how difficult it is to know what is really healthy when you have to eat out or buy simple packaged food at a grocery store. You hear the health buzz words like “Oats”, “Brown Bread”, “Multi-grain”, “Baked” and automatically select food options that contain them.

Unlike many developed countries, in India there are no resources available to easily identify the healthy quotient of a packaged food, leaving it to consumers to kind of make sense of the fine print and take a right decision on what they consume.

During various conversations with Saurabh and Sangeeta, I realized that they were equally passionate about choosing healthy foods especially when it came to their children.

Thus the idea of creating a simple tool to help millions like us, PurpleKaddu.com was born. This is simply a portal that will help people understand the food they are eating and select the food as per their needs.

We combined our passion and consumer focused technology solution expertise with a team of nutritionists to create a nutritional knowledge base of food that will provide information and guidance on packaged foods, beverage products and recipes. Purple Kaddu has over 1000 popular package food products that have been rated and reviewed till date.

We wanted Purple Kaddu to be based on an algorithm that would determine the nutritional balance of food and not be biased by the people who are reviewing them. This resulted in creation of a visually unique ‘Pumpkin’ or as we like to call it ‘Kaddu’ rating system where 5 Pumpkins are indicative of nutritional balanced food whereas as we go towards ½ Pumpkin, foods are generally high in nutrients which are to be restricted such as sugar, fat etc. as well as contain more of artificial ingredients & additives.

The food products are rated and reviewed based on the information provided by the companies on their packages.

This is just the start of our journey and we will continuously strive add more products and make our rating system robust. Our dream is to evolve rating system to the level where it will be used by various online as well food markets to help their customers choose healthy food.

Looking forward to hearing from fellow entrepreneurs about PurpleKaddu.com

Facebook: purplekaddu

Twitter: @purplekaddu