The Taste Company forays into ready-to-eat market

Hyderabad : Hyderabad-based The Taste Company on Monday announced its foray into the ready-to-eat market. The company makes high-quality, tasty and hygienic all-natural ready-to-eat Indian meals.

"The Taste Company is the first company in India to offer non-veg ready-to-eat meals. It has seen tremendous traction during the pilot in the last six months and has gained trust among thousands of consumers already," said Raju Vanapala, Founder and CEO.

The company offers two non-veg meal boxes - chicken curry rice and exotic prawn rice, along with vegetarian meal options such as classic dal rice, special veg rice and dal khichdi. The company also has a ready-to-eat breakfast product range such as classic rava upma, pongal and semiya upma. The meals take 3-5 minutes to be prepared, with no hassles of cooking.

All the products have a shelf life of six months and the prices range from Rs 89 to Rs 149. The Taste Company has established a new factory with an advanced dehydration and freeze drying technology unit at Patancheru in Hyderabad that can produce two million meal boxes per month. The company has spent close to Rs 22 crore on infrastructure and R&D.

"Today, we are launching these products in almost 500 modern retail outlets across Hyderabad and Bengaluru. We are targeting to expand this to 3,000 outlets by this year end," Raju Vanapala said.

"More than 71 per cent of Indians prefer non-vegetarian food. This demand was left unaddressed by the present instant food brands, who were still experimenting with the breakfast range. The Taste Company is steps ahead in its product research and innovation to come up with a non-vegetarian and vegetarian meal range complete with breakfast products beyond Upma and Poha," he said.