The word ‘fresh’ when it comes to vegetables, is not often associated with the words ‘organic’ and ‘easy’. This is often because few organic stores sell vegetables in sufficient quantities and most vegetables are almost always sold out the very evening they are brought in, often leaving stale and soggy ones for shoppers who can’t make it in time.
This is the gap that the e-venture EasyTaaza has begun to bridge by offering farm fresh organic vegetables, harvested just 12 hours earlier, delivered to your doorstep every day so you can cook and eat fresh.
“It is as good as picking vegetables from your back garden. We believe in ‘zero storage and zero wastage’,” says Sateesh Babu, founder-CEO, EasyTaaza.
“Today we are wasting over half the vegetables we are harvesting. The vegetables wait for so long at the farm, the trucks, the market and in your fridge that they lose their nutritional value. It is almost as good as eating digestible plastic.”
EasyTaaza, on the other hand, takes monthly subscriptions wherein customers order their vegetables a week in advance based on the menu of available vegetables that are put up on the website and the app.
“We deliver just enough for a day, along with some chillies, curry leaves, coriander and a few tomatoes so families can use them up on the same day. Plus we pay the farmers on a cash-and-carry basis so they don’t have to wait for over a month as they normally do,” explains the former IT professional, who discovered his passion for enabling access to healthy food after his second child had to undergo a heart surgery when he was seven months old.
“I did a lot of reading on the possible causes for his condition and it struck me that it could have been because of the food we eat. When we were kids, we had better food. But, today, babies in the womb are forced to consume the pesticide-ridden food that we are eating.”
When he decided to switch to organic groceries as a healthier option, he found it both difficult to source and store them.
“So I partnered with a peer mentor, Rohith KN, an older colleague and came up with this model.”
Right from the first harvest, when they sent out free samples, they started receiving orders based on word-of-mouth.
“At first, we were supplying vegetables in restricted portion sizes, measured by hand, based on the size and the shape of the vegetables. At that time, I believed that weighing vegetables was tantamount to disrespecting them. Then we received feedback that while our quality was appreciated, there was a fluctuation in quantity.”
Another challenge they faced was to find genuinely organic produce, which is why they also send some vegetables to be tested for pesticide residue.
“It is also equally hard to make consumers understand that since we are dealing with nature, anything can happen at any time. Having said that, in two years of service, we have only missed two days of delivery, due to a hailstorm.”
EasyTaaza is also working to educate consumers on what it means to choose organic food and how to work with fresh produce. To this end, they conduct cooking workshops, they have collaborated with a nutritionist. They also take customers on visits to the farms.
“We believe in respecting nature and in getting what is available on the farm rather than focusing only on what we (people) want,” he explains.
They also want to incorporate terrace and kitchen gardening as part of their service so customers can harvest vegetables from their own gardening spaces at least once a week.
“It is not rocket science, we used to do this in our childhood, we just lost touch with it,” says Sateesh, who is starting off with a kitchen garden in an independent house.
“We should restart this tradition because in most communities there is land, water and there are also gardeners. All we need to do is replace the ornamental plants with vegetables.”
EasyTaaza currently serves parts of Bengaluru including JP Nagar, Bannerghatta Road, Electronic City and Belandur. They are now expanding to offer fruits, cereals and grains.
For details, visit easytaaza.com.
