Wholsum Foods, which owns healthy snack brand Slurrp Farm, secured funding worth $7 million from the Investment Corporation of Dubai, the sovereign wealth fund of the government of Dubai, and India-based investment fund Fireside Ventures.
The funds will be used to increase the brand's global footprint, boost its marketing and support product innovation, Wholsum Foods said on Wednesday.
They will also help the company advance its “core purpose of developing millet-based products with zero junk ingredients” while boosting demand for millet and other grains.
“We are growing steadily and currently clocking in over Dh25m [$6.8m] of revenue run rate, with an aim to reach Dh250m in revenue by 2025,” said founders and co-chief executives Meghana Narayan and Shauravi Malik.
“The funds raised will enable us to build a global FMCG [fast moving consumer goods] brand and take millets to the world.”
Ms Narayan and Ms Malik, former executives at McKinsey & Co and JP Morgan, respectively, founded Slurrp Farm in 2016 after noticing a gap in the market for healthy snacks for children.
They formed Wholsum Foods by reworking recipes used in their own homes and developed them into commercial products.
The global healthy snacks market is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 4.2 per cent from 2019 to $108.1 billion by 2027, according to Fortune Business Insights.
The Covid-19 pandemic has further accelerated the shift to healthy food, Wholsum Foods said, with Slurrp Farm growing tenfold growth between June 2020 and December 2021.
Slurrp Farm, based in India, entered the UAE market in 2021, and is looking to grow its offline and online presence in the region by 40 per cent in the next 12 months, the company said.
It also started retail operations in the UK and the US last year.
“The Slurrp Farm brand is backed by the goodness of superfood ingredients like millets and has built enormous appeal for itself since inception,” Nader Bekhouche, principal for investment (growth equity) at ICD, said.
“We seek to partner with companies like Wholsum Foods that are building innovative digital-first brands that focus on good for consumers and good for the world while also enjoying a large shareholder value creation opportunity. We believe that Wholsum Foods … is poised to achieve significant scale.”
Wholsum Foods previously raised $2m from Fireside Ventures in 2020 and $1m from more than 20 angel investors, including Reckitt Benckiser's former chief executive Rakesh Kapoor, Info Edge founder and executive chairman Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Aditya Ghosh, board member at Akasa, Fab India and Oyo, and Yasemin Lamy, deputy chief investment officer of impact investment group CDC.
Paatal Lok season two
Directors: Avinash Arun, Prosit Roy
Stars: Jaideep Ahlawat, Ishwak Singh, Lc Sekhose, Merenla Imsong
Rating: 4.5/5
How to protect yourself when air quality drops
Install an air filter in your home.
Close your windows and turn on the AC.
Shower or bath after being outside.
Wear a face mask.
Stay indoors when conditions are particularly poor.
If driving, turn your engine off when stationary.
Iran's dirty tricks to dodge sanctions
There’s increased scrutiny on the tricks being used to keep commodities flowing to and from blacklisted countries. Here’s a description of how some work.
1 Going Dark
A common method to transport Iranian oil with stealth is to turn off the Automatic Identification System, an electronic device that pinpoints a ship’s location. Known as going dark, a vessel flicks the switch before berthing and typically reappears days later, masking the location of its load or discharge port.
2. Ship-to-Ship Transfers
A first vessel will take its clandestine cargo away from the country in question before transferring it to a waiting ship, all of this happening out of sight. The vessels will then sail in different directions. For about a third of Iranian exports, more than one tanker typically handles a load before it’s delivered to its final destination, analysts say.
3. Fake Destinations
Signaling the wrong destination to load or unload is another technique. Ships that intend to take cargo from Iran may indicate their loading ports in sanction-free places like Iraq. Ships can keep changing their destinations and end up not berthing at any of them.
4. Rebranded Barrels
Iranian barrels can also be rebranded as oil from a nation free from sanctions such as Iraq. The countries share fields along their border and the crude has similar characteristics. Oil from these deposits can be trucked out to another port and documents forged to hide Iran as the origin.
* Bloomberg
War
Director: Siddharth Anand
Cast: Hrithik Roshan, Tiger Shroff, Ashutosh Rana, Vaani Kapoor
Rating: Two out of five stars
India squad for fourth and fifth Tests
Kohli (c), Dhawan, Rahul, Shaw, Pujara, Rahane (vc), Karun, Karthik (wk), Pant (wk), Ashwin, Jadeja, Pandya, Ishant, Shami, Umesh, Bumrah, Thakur, Vihari
The 100 Best Novels in Translation
Boyd Tonkin, Galileo Press
NYBL PROFILE
Company name: Nybl
Date started: November 2018
Founder: Noor Alnahhas, Michael LeTan, Hafsa Yazdni, Sufyaan Abdul Haseeb, Waleed Rifaat, Mohammed Shono
Based: Dubai, UAE
Sector: Software Technology / Artificial Intelligence
Initial investment: $500,000
Funding round: Series B (raising $5m)
Partners/Incubators: Dubai Future Accelerators Cohort 4, Dubai Future Accelerators Cohort 6, AI Venture Labs Cohort 1, Microsoft Scale-up
Omar Yabroudi's factfile
Born: October 20, 1989, Sharjah
Education: Bachelor of Science and Football, Liverpool John Moores University
2010: Accrington Stanley FC, internship
2010-2012: Crystal Palace, performance analyst with U-18 academy
2012-2015: Barnet FC, first-team performance analyst/head of recruitment
2015-2017: Nottingham Forest, head of recruitment
2018-present: Crystal Palace, player recruitment manager
