The Good Food Revolution with Naario by Anamika

Naario is a healthy food brand that also serves as a women-powered movement for healthier living. From millets to micro-distributors, everything here is built with purpose.

This is the story of Anamika Pandey, the founder of Naario.

Table of Contents

About Her Life and Career

Before NAARIO became a growing clean-eating brand, before millets, alternate grains, and community-led distribution entered the picture, the journey began with a strong foundation in systems, discipline, and consumer understanding.

Anamika graduated from NIT Warangal in 2017 and immediately entered the fast-paced world of startups by joining BigBasket. At the time, BigBasket itself was still young, about five to seven years into its journey, and scaling rapidly.

There she led new initiatives, learning firsthand how consumer businesses actually operate. This wasn’t classroom learning. It was on-ground exposure to decision-making, experimentation, and execution at scale. Over time, three core learnings deeply shaped her thinking.

First, capital discipline. Frugality wasn’t optional; it was ingrained. Every experiment, hire, marketing spend, and expansion decision had to justify itself.
Second, consumer insight is not just through conversations but also by deeply studying complaints and feedback to understand what customers were not saying directly.
Third, people-first leadership taking care of teams so they stay, grow, and commit long-term.

These lessons quietly became the building blocks of what would later become NAARIO.

From the very beginning of her career, she also started saving aggressively, knowing she wanted to build something of her own someday. By the time she decided to take the leap, she had saved ₹22–23 lakhs, money that would later become the backbone of her entrepreneurial journey.

In mid-2020, during peak COVID uncertainty, she quit her job. It was a bold decision. No safety net, no guarantees, just conviction, savings, and time.

Starting NAARIO

Anamika noticed that more and more women, especially mothers, were actively reading labels, tracking calories, understanding protein and carb content, and still feeling dissatisfied with the options available. Healthy often meant bland, expensive, or unsustainable.

So instead of building a brand in isolation, she began by building a community.

Women came together to brainstorm how everyday staples and snacks could be made with better, cleaner ingredients and alternate grains, millets, and recipes that didn’t feel like punishment. NAARIO wasn’t just created for women; it was created with them.

Every product is co-created by women from the community, and many customers also double up as micro-distributors. The business model is trust-driven, community-powered, and deeply personal.

The brand started quietly testing, learning, and refining categories and subcategories before formally raising its first funding round in early 2022.

Challenges

One of the biggest shocks for any first-time consumer brand founder is realizing how fast money runs out.

Marketing channels are expensive. Performance marketing costs fluctuate constantly. Platforms like Meta change rules every few months. What looks manageable on paper often feels overwhelming in reality.

For NAARIO, 2022–2023 was a particularly difficult phase. By then, the funding environment for D2C and consumer brands had slowed significantly, and capital was drying up across the ecosystem. At the same time, NAARIO was running out of funds.

What helped NAARIO stay afloat was a combination of investor support, who stood by and helped raise another round, and one crucial strategic decision: expanding into B2B.

Revenue: From Survival to Stability

In its first year, NAARIO clocked around ₹35 lakhs in revenue.

As the business matured, NAARIO consciously expanded its B2B channel. Unlike D2C, B2B doesn’t require heavy marketing spending. It focuses on fewer, larger clients, with the main challenge being working capital management.

This shift helped stabilize cash flows and significantly boosted growth.

Today, NAARIO is touching ₹3.6 crore in revenue, built steadily not through flashy spending, but through disciplined execution.

Big Wins: Proof That the Model Works

Several moments validated the NAARIO vision.

One was seeing 40%+ repeat customer rates, a big deal in e-commerce. It confirmed that consumers weren’t just trying the product; they were coming back for taste, not just health.

Another major milestone came during Diwali 2024, when NAARIO cracked its first B2B client, NY Cinemas. What made this moment extraordinary was that the deal was handled end-to-end by a woman micro-distributor, a homemaker who had spent the last 10–15 years at home raising children.

Since then, NAARIO has added Cinépolis and Encalm (airport lounges) to its B2B portfolio and is preparing for a TV show appearance, which is expected to significantly increase visibility.

Looking Forward: The Next Chapter

The immediate future comes with a good problem to have: supply constraints. With increased visibility from B2B expansion and the upcoming TV show, ensuring supply readiness is the top priority.

Over the next 90 days, the focus areas are clear: