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Habbit Is Targeting A $47 Billion Opportunity In India: Dhruv Bhushan, Co-Founder & CEO, Habbit

In an interview with BW Disrupt, Dhruv Bhushan, Co-Founder & CEO, Habbit, talks about how the company's products are different from others, funding and more

What is the inspiration behind the startup?
I underwent a remarkable physical transformation of having lost over 70kgs. While achieving this seemingly impossible feat, I realized that health and nutrition had been made out to be too difficult, confusing, and complicated. Instead of helping fix the root cause of poor dietary choices and lifestyle, incumbents were busy pushing strange foods that didn’t taste good, or magic pills and powders that didn’t work. Which is why most consumers fell off the health journey, and no brand has been able to scale up. What was needed was reinventing food for the future, which would be healthy, tasty, and familiar, so that it could be easily adopted as a daily lifestyle. This was a multi-billion dollar opportunity. Starting from this insight, we set out to fundamentally disrupt foods and beverages and used that as the starting point to create a new-age global digital F&B company, to offer an end-to-end solution for healthy consumption.  

The tech-led gamified health journey makes the Habbit experience the easiest way to be healthy for everyone in the family. Over many years of research, using proprietary innovations, ingredients, and processes, Habbit has found ways to make every single food, beverage, or nutra item of consumption,  as healthy as possible while maintaining the same taste. Over the next few years, we will have the world's biggest portfolio of health-oriented products, allowing us to meet all of our consumer needs, from one super app. 

We aim to make health and nutrition accessible to and enjoyable for everyone in the family, as a daily lifestyle, and not be just limited to fitness enthusiasts and athletes.
With research and product development having started in October 2016, once we were convinced of the significant disruption we were about to bring, and the exceptional love that we were getting from our beta testers, Habbit was incorporated on November 1, 2019. Our full-stack offering habbit.health for consumers went live on February 1st, 2021 and has been witnessing unprecedented growth in adoption. Habbit grew 8x last month and will reach $0.5mn in ARR the next month.

How is Habbit's latest range of products different from others?
The distinctive factor across all of Habbit’s products lies in our intensive global R&D. We have spent over 3 years to start building a portfolio of innovative products using original, natural, and clean ingredients. More than 10,000 top lifestyle, fitness, health, and wellness experts have been involved in product trials. At present, we have launched 5 categories of products: 3 categories of natural proteins for different dietary and lifestyle preferences, 1 daily nutrition shake for the family, and  Wise Creams which are the lowest calorie ice creams in the world.

As we grow we keep on adding all categories of regular consumption, which we can then personalize and put on subscriptions. Each of our products are disruptively healthy and operate in superlatives such as lowest calorie, cleanest, creamiest, on the planet. 

How much funding did you raise? If yes, please name those investors with the amount.
We have raised a pre-seed round led by 3One4 Capital and AngelList India with participation from Better Capital, First Cheque, RB Investments and multiple global angels. 

At present, the company is in talks to raise a $4mn seed round from top VCs.

What market & TG are you looking at in the initial stage?
We are building for and messaging to households earning more than 20L annual household income. There are 10mn such households in India, expected to grow to 23mn accounting for 22% of all consumption by 2030. The buyer within the household is typically a health aware adult (>70% women) aged 25-40, living in urban metropolitan areas. They are well educated, spend online, travel the world and have seen their consumption preferences evolve to more clean, healthy and nutritious foods. They may not be the most involved fitness enthusiasts, but are often at the beginning of their health journeys. From there, as we grow, we launch products for other members of their household, including children and seniors. Brand messaging however continues to focus on the lifestyle and not on the product.

By disrupting daily F&B and nutrition, Habbit is targeting a $47bn opportunity in India, and a potential $1tn dollar market globally. 

What are the growth and expansion plans? Where do you see Habbit in the next 5 years?
In the near future, we see ourselves entering different markets and segments in the F&B space with a diverse portfolio of products. We will launch multiple new products in 2021 including one type of gourmet food protein, a healthy and refreshing carbonated beverage that can be consumed throughout the day, choco nut bars, an indulgent clean cookie, plant based milks and a savory snack. All these products will be available in multiple flavours to ensure that the consumer gets a perfect blend of good taste and health. Additionally, we  plan to launch 5 more categories in 2022 which are currently under development. 

We are currently building our unique distribution and acquisition playbook in Delhi NCR. Our products are already going viral with massive buzz being created in the right circles. We will hit $3mn ARR by Dec’ 21 and then start replicating the model in other cities starting with Mumbai and Bengaluru. By 2023, Habbit will be present in 20 cities in India before going international to Dubai and Singapore. By 2026, with over 30 disruptive categories launched, we aim to be the brand of choice of daily consumption for over 1.5L households, generating an ARR of over $100mn. 


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