Bihar Snack Startup Hits ₹1 Crore Preserving Old Recipes

Jayanta Karmakar got sick from eating thekua at a roadside stall when he was 16, and that upset stomach became a business idea worth over ₹1 crore.

Thekua is a deep-fried sweet snack made during Chhath Puja, a festival honoring the sun god celebrated across Bihar and eastern India. Every family has their own recipe passed down through generations, but the packaged versions sold in stores often taste nothing like what people remember from childhood.

Karmakar wondered why a snack so tied to cultural memory had to be either cheap and unsafe or expensive and hard to find. He wanted to bring back the original taste in a clean, accessible form that people could trust.

In 2025, he founded Shuddh Swad with Kailash Bouri in Adra, West Bengal. Bouri had dropped out of school and was selling water bottles at railway stations when Karmakar pitched him the idea. Samir Ansari joined as CEO in August to handle operations as the startup grew.

The company makes thekua using wheat flour, semolina, desi ghee, milk, dry coconut, and dry fruits, with no preservatives or additives. The dough gets shaped in traditional wooden molds and deep-fried, just like it would be made at home.

Shuddh Swad now offers three variants: coconut and suji, coconut and jaggery, and cardamom. They sell through their website and major platforms like Amazon, Flipkart, Blinkit, and Instamart.

The startup crossed ₹1 crore in revenue within its first year, entirely bootstrapped from an initial investment of just ₹10,000. The team has grown from 11 to 40 employees, with 60 to 70 percent of workers hired locally.

The Ripple Effect

Shuddh Swad is tapping into India's ethnic foods market, valued at $5.7 billion in 2025 and projected to reach $10.8 billion by 2034. But the founders aren't just chasing market share.

They're researching traditional recipes from 20 years ago, before ingredients were swapped for cheaper alternatives or proportions changed to extend shelf life. The goal is to recover these recipes in their original forms and expand beyond Bihar and West Bengal to preserve traditional snacks from across India.

Older customers get a taste of what they grew up eating. Younger buyers discover traditional alternatives to chips and processed snacks.

The founders appeared on Bharat Ke Superfounders, an OTT reality show featuring Indian entrepreneur stories, which gave them a bigger platform to share their mission. Now they're developing snacks from other states, one rescued recipe at a time.

Sometimes the best business ideas start with a stomachache and a simple question: what if we made this the right way?