This Alappuzha startup has a crisp plan with its banana chips

Banana chips are truly an emotion for people in South India. Now imagine getting so hooked on the food item that you quit your corporate job to make it into a profitable business. That’s the story of Manas Madhu and Beyond Snack. 

A resident of Kerala, Madhu wanted to bring Kerala’s staple snack—crispy kaay upperi, popularly banana chips—to the world. He aimed to standardise the production process to ensure consistency in taste, texture, and thickness. 

In 2015, he quit his job as a senior consultant at Capgemini, shifted to Kerala, and studied the industry. “Currently, banana chips are seen as one of the fried chips, unlike potato chips, which is a category in itself. We plan to build in India for the globe,” Madhu, Co-founder and Managing Director of Beyond Snack, tells YourStory.

He, along with Jyoti Rajguru and Gautam Raghuraman, started the Alappuzha startup in 2020, which makes banana chips in a blend of flavours—original (salted), peri peri, salt and black pepper, sour cream onion and parsley, desi masala, and hot and sweet chilli.

With an eye on sharing the shelves with the likes of Lay’s and Bingo, Beyond Snack makes six varieties of chips, including the recently launched coconut oil-based banana chips and waves.

Madhu wants his customers to have the same experience each time they try Beyond Snack’s chips. To achieve this, the company has standardised the manufacturing process. 

With 95% of the process fully automated at its Tumkur facility at India Food Park, the startup’s production capacity has increased to 6.6 metric tonnes (MT) per month compared to 2-2.5 MT earlier. It aims to increase to 600 MT by 2027.

Sourcing the right ingredients

Consistency and quality play a major role in Beyond Snack’s operations, and it has partnered with 220 farmer groups in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka to procure high-quality ripe bananas.

At the facility, the bananas undergo a quality check, and the team selects only the Grade-1 crop—bananas that have reached proper maturity, which helps maintain the chip’s crunch and taste.

Madhu draws a comparison between Beyond Snack chips and the ones found locally saying the latter uses unhealthy oil, reused over and over again. The startup’s R&D team worked with various oil manufacturers to get the right kind of oil best suited for the cooking process of banana chips.

“Refined coconut oil can withstand higher temperatures, making it suitable for the frying of banana chips,” he explains. The startup offers six flavours, combo packs of 3X100 gms on its website, priced between Rs 199 and Rs 240. It sells single packets of 75 gms, priced at Rs 60, on ecommerce sites including Swiggy and Zepto.

“It takes time and effort to develop the flavours, and this brings excitement among customers… We want to make banana chips cool,” the CEO says.

The typical cream and onion flavour is not suitable for bananas, due to its slightly sweet taste. However, Beyond Snack adds more sourness to the flavour and creates a special blend that “works by complementing the taste of bananas.” Even the spicy peri peri flavour is “more tangier than the normal peri peri flavour.” 

Business operations

The startup started its offline retail in Bengaluru and expanded to some regions in Kerala in January 2020. However, as the pandemic struck, Beyond Snack shifted to an online retail model and started seeing increased sales.

Since then, it has slowly expanded its offline presence across India—from 20-25 distributors to now 125 distributors across Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Delhi, Punjab, and Bengaluru and Hyderabad in the south. 

Beyond Snack sees its highest traction from Maharashtra, followed by Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal. 

It also exports to 15 countries, including the US, UK, Mauritius, Singapore, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Qatar, Kuwait, Sweden, Dubai, Thailand, and Malaysia.

In FY24, the company clocked a revenue of Rs 34 crore, almost double from about 17 crore in FY23. It projects Rs 100 crore in revenue for FY25. 

While it briefly touched profitability, the company is currently spending more on acquiring customers and ensuring its presence, aiming to be profitable by 2026.

According to data company Tracxn, Beyond Snack competes with Truly Kerala, Crizpo, and EnChipsu.

In July 2023, it raised $3.5 million in a seed round from NABVENTURES and has raised a total of $5.98 million in funding over six rounds, Tracxn data shows. It plans to raise more funds in a year.

Workforce and challenges

Beyond Snack employs a total of 220 people, of which 52 are permanent employees and the rest are on a contract.

Madhu wanted to be run entirely by a women workforce, however, challenges with the mechanical aspect of the production have deemed it to have a team of about 80% women.

“We have 11 women as shadows of the male workers in these areas so that by 2026, we can achieve a 100% women-run facility,” he adds.

The company also faced challenges with standardisation across products. “The banana chips out there are sometimes soggy, hard, or give a foul aftertaste… It took us almost eight months to standardise the product,” he says.

Being in an impulse buying category, in the next five years, the company aims to become a global brand like Lay’s and reach a Rs 5,000 crore revenue.

“Banana chips are seen as a subset of namkeens. The category needs restructuring, and we want to take it out of the namkeens and create an independent category for it,” Madhu says.