These sisters are going places with their homemade asafoetida

It took Varsha Prasanth 15 attempts to get the asafoetida compound right. Asafoetida ( Ferula asafoetida) is the dried sap derived from the roots of Ferula plants. It is commonly used in Indian cuisine and in Ayurveda. 

Having learnt to make this commercially viable product at a one-day training programme in Agro Park, Piravom, she recalls sitting with her father, Prasanth A., in their house in Kalamassery and mixing pungent asafoetida resin, wheat flour and arabica gum several times over to get the proportion right. “Slowly, I was getting closer to the required solid form,” she says. Once it was ready, the mixture was manually packed into 25 gm cakes in paper boxes by her parents, sisters and herself. Varsha and her father would visit hotels and supermarkets for orders.

After six months, Varsha founded 3Vees International (her sisters are Vismaya and Vrinda) with the compound as the company’s core product. Begun with a seed capital of ₹ 2 lakhs in 2019, the company now has a ₹ 1.25 crore turnover and has diversified into breakfast products and spice powders. Packaging, blending and freezing have all been automated and employees include 10 local women and a fleet of sales executives. With orders coming in from across Kerala and even from abroad, Varsha has gained recognition and won awards such as Kairali Jwala Awards 2022; Women’s Day 2022-Young Entrepreneur’s Award and JCI Young Entrepreneurs Award 2021.

“I did not dream of this nor had I planned to reach this level. I am happy but equally surprised,” says the 26-year-old, sitting on the Managing Director’s swivel chair in her office at the manufacturing unit, in a rented house.

Home factory

Earlier, I had lost my way to the office at Surya Nagar, Kalamassery, but was rescued by Varsha and Vrindaon an e-bike. At 11 am, the unit is busy. In the small verandah, two women are labelling little packets while the front room has racks of packaging material. A big blending machine that turns asafetida into cake form looms large in another room. Two other rooms have an automatic packaging machine each. A pulveriser to powder asafoetida is placed alongside. There is a freeze dryer in the kitchen where a group of women chat during a tea break while tea boils in a saucepan. I don’t find the strong odour of asafoetida as I expected; instead, the fragrance of masalas hangs warmly in the air.

We make our way to Varsha’s office, a small space shared by the women helping her in administration. “I had an idea of starting something of my own but was not clear which product to choose,” says Varsha who did her MBA from SCMS in Kochi. The family hails from Mallapuram and moved to Kochi five years ago for the girls’ higher education. Her father helped her zero in on asafoetida as a commercially viable option. She had read market studies and found that one company had a monopoly over the production, and there was no one in South India making this, though Asafoetida was a staple in south Indian cooking. “My father is from the pharmaceutical world and has experience in distribution and sales. He advised me there,” she says of the initial planning.

3Vees asafoetida
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

As work increased and the staff was hired, Varsha divided responsibilities between family members. Her mother Sarala was tasked with the production and oversees the work of the women. Vismaya, who is a CA and pursues a full-time job, chips in with financial advice. Vrinda, the youngest sister, is in charge of online promotion and sales, of maintaining social media pages, while Varsha oversees business development and administration.

Government schemes for women entrepreneurs

Varsha finds a lack of awareness as the biggest hurdle. “There are many government schemes for women entrepreneurs but when we are starting, we are not aware of these,” she says. She learnt about the schemes from District Industrial Development Corporation and applied for Mudra Loan under PMEGP Scheme. “We get subsidy for purchase of machinery, but if we do not know the scheme properly, we lose the subsidy.”

Within 18 months of starting, she expanded her product range to add spice powders and breakfast products like appam, puttu and roasted rava powders. Her latest diversification is into freeze-dried products; an experiment on her table shows bright yellow packets of dehydrated Banana Fig. Enquiries from the Malayali diaspora in West Asia are plenty, she says. “Kerala snacks will be a good option. Made with Nendran bananas and laced with honey, the product has a shelf life of six months.”

Varsha offers discounts or extra packets on immediate payments to deal with competition. She has applied for an export license and an ISO certificate and is also looking for investors.

“I am learning as I go,” she says looking at the busy women immersed in work.