Gibran Osman: Raising the bar in health food with an Indian sweet

As a young man of 19, Gibran Osman was 40 kg overweight. He had the good fortune of growing up with a mother who ran a catering business from the family home, so he was never far away from a plate of biryani or shami kebabs. 

But once he started his career as a TV presenter and actor, getting in shape became a priority.  He lost the excess weight, but while working for a music channel, he spent a lot of time on the road, travelling to college campuses to do student shows. “It was difficult to get healthy food on the go. I lived on biscuits and junk food.” 

He started carrying a bag of gond ke laddoos, an Indian sweet made with dry fruit and gum arabic.  Made in his home kitchen and with a fairly long shelf life, it proved a nutritious and filling snack for on his travels.

A few years later, when Gibran was looking for something to do outside the entertainment industry, he came back to the gond ke laddoos. Supermarket shelves in India have a glut of health-food products: muesli bars, cereals and sugar bombs with unpronounceable ingredients. Gibran wanted to create a product that was simple, something with dried fruits and nuts that was preservative-free, the perfect snack for after a workout or when you’re on the road and that explains the humble beginnings of Splendid Food Company, the maker of healthy snack foods.

To lower the fat content, his product didn’t use ghee (clarified butter) as a binder. After a bit of research, he created a 450-gm box of the mixture that cost Rs 250, but new challenges presented themselves: Gibran found that he had to think about shelf life, packing and storage, all of which he had absolutely no experience with. He discovered that selling one product was not economically viable, and compared to other products in the market, his pricing for a new, unknown product was a bit too ambitious.

When his product showed all signs of tanking, the newly married Gibran turned to his wife Sadia for ideas. Her input was to start with something cheaper. Together, they developed two new products: oat and dry fruit bars in two flavours at Rs 50 each. Using the infrastructure of his mother’s catering business, they were able to churn out 200 bars a day.

The new products had a two-month shelf life, limiting the radius for where the bars could be transported. “Anywhere that is, at most, an overnight journey from Chennai, where it is made, makes sense, because it takes a minimum of one week to get the products on the shelf.”

Gibran was also fortunate to get the Tamil Nadu distribution rights for products from SwitzGroup, a Dubai-based international chain of bakery companies. This  meant that he could use their network for his product too. Once the bars were on the market and Gibran had acquired a few gourmet and health food supermarkets as his clients, the original mixture started to sell too.

“Boom! Splendid health bars were selling off shelves across the city, customers now could associate the health mix with the bars and the sale of health mix also increased. Now splendid health food products are supplied to 50 stores plus a couple of online stores like Big Basket,” said Gibran.

“We strive to make sure a fresh product is always available to the customer in store. And we have recently initiated a subscription based supply where customer can subscribe for the bars and the supply will be made every month to the customer’s home or office,” he said.

Asked about what he learnt from his role as an entrepreneur, he said that he learnt that having a product he believed in wasn’t enough. A feasible distribution network and knowledge of his market and buyer habits were key.

Introducing the new gond based health mix into the market was hard, he recollected. “ It didn’t help that it was the most expensive on the shelf in its category.  I was confident that I had a quality product, but letting the consumers know and earning their confidence was tedious,” said Gibran.