Robin Uthappa-backed startup iTiffin to encourage kids & adults to eat healthy

AHMEDABAD: A Bengaluru tiffin service, in which cricketer Robin Uthappa is an investor, is encouraging children to munch healthy this holiday season. There are highfibre, low-calorie munchies for the grownups, too.

One-and-half-year-old iTiffin, an online and offline supplier of healthy meals, will load ‘Kids Holiday Munch Box’ with fruits, nuts and fibrous snacks. The ‘Munch Box’ for the adults will mostly have baked snacks.

The munch boxes can be ordered online from anywhere, but the tiffin services are currently available only in Bengaluru. Daily deliveries currently near 2,500 lunch, dinner and midnight meals to the IT crowd in Bengaluru.

The startup has plans to expand the tiffin services to 20 cities over three years. It is targeting to raise $10 million (.`62.3 crore) by the end of this May and the expansion drive will pick up pace after that, said Tapan Kumar Das, a former Flipkart executive who cofounded iTiffin.

While growing incidents of lifestyle diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, kidney and liver problems and cancer are driving people to healthy eating habits, snacks that are eaten between meals often remain unhealthy.

Munch Box is an attempt to address the lack of options to munch healthy.

“Healthy food has to move beyond meals. It is those hunger pangs between breakfast and lunch and that between lunch and dinner where Indians eat junk, mostly comprising fried snacks. Our Munch Boxes for adults and kids would hence be subscription based to encourage them to eat healthy throughout the day,” Das said. iTiffin has plans also to launch diabetic control ready-to cook chapatti flour and customised salads.

The cities where iTiffin plans to enter next include Hyderabad, Pune, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Delhi and Ahmedabad. It would also set up two kiosks in Bengaluru for walk-in customers.