Ashish Nichani - CEO & Co-founder, Postcard Snacks

Postcard is founded by Ashish Nichani & Sudarsan Metla. Previously, Ashish had completed his engineering from RV College, Bangalore and MBA from IIFT Delhi post which he had worked with Axis Bank in Mumbai for 5 years, before moving to ING Bank in Bangalore where he worked for a couple of years. While working together at ING, both Ashish & Sudarsan built a strong working relationship which translated into a friendship as they bonded together on food and travel.

Driven by our passion for food and ambition to build our own business, we quit our bank jobs in 2014 and worked on our first foray in the world of speciality food – ‘Place of Origin’. We built Place of Origin to become India's first and largest ecommerce marketplace for speciality food serving 4000+ SKUs from 400 local brands in 124 towns of India.

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Learning from our customer insights and experiences over 5 years at Place of Origin, we reworked our model and decided to dive back into the specialty food business with Postcard – our omnichannel brand of the local foods of India.

Postcard journey

Postcard launched at the end of 2019. Initially we focussed on select SKUs and an omnichannel strategy. However, the pandemic that started within 3 months of our launch, affected our strategy.

From June 2020 we focussed on crafting Postcard into a D2C gourmet brand of India’s local foods and introduced an assortment of 100 unique foods.

We have scaled up the business and have sold 500,000 Postcard units in 18 months. As of April 2022, our business has become part of the Wingreens World platform where we join iconic brands such as Wingreens Farms, RAW Pressery, Monsoon Harvest etc in a collective designed to provide new-age Indian customers with better-for-you choices of food and beverages across categories.

Our Focus

The Indian snack and beverage market accounts for a staggering 30% of India`s massive FMCG market. And within this market, snacks accounts for the majority share. To give you a sense of the scale involved, the slice that you likely interact with most often – the Indian packaged snack market alone is worth Rs.37000 crore! And when you add on other associated traditional prepared local foods such as pickles, condiments, masalas, chutneys, mukhwas – we are talking of a potentially Rs.50,000 crore market.

The snack market consists of legacy Indian brands and white-labelled brands who derive 60% of their sales from a handful of products such as the bhujia, khatta meetha mix and peanuts while MNC brands and most new-age startups focus on Western flavours of chips, nachos etc.

There is no Indian brand that is bringing all the diverse and authentic local flavours of India into retail stores, egrocery and ecommerce. Postcard is our answer to disrupt this market and address the opportunity with a singular brand that brings together diversity, quality and service.

The challenge is not just about sustaining the culinary heritage of India. Its as much about sustaining and upskilling more diverse local communities across India, maintaining agricultural traditions and restoring an ecological balance. And the truth is, all of these are interconnected. What we eat matters.

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