His family earned Rs 10 a day. Three meals a day was a distant dream. And now Mustafa PC has his own company. In fact, he is the CEO of packaged food company iD Fresh Food, which is worth Rs 2,000 crore.

Mustafa was born in a village in Kerala’s Wayanad district. His father was a daily wager. After failing in Class 6, Mustafa dropped out of school to help his father.

“I'd tell myself, 'Right now, food is more important than education',” he told the Humans of Bombay.

However, his teacher convinced him to return to school and tutored him for free. His teacher’s perseverance bore fruit and soon Mustafa enrolled with NIT Calicut for Engineering in Computer Science. He later completed his MBA from IIM-Bangalore.

Initially, Mustafa worked with MNCs in India and abroad. However, the entrepreneur in him wanted to start a business. “Despite a well-paying job, I always wanted to run a business,” he said.

It was his cousin who suggested the idea of packaged food business, after he chanced upon a customer complaining about the quality of the idly-dosa batter he bought from a supplier.

iD Fresh Food was founded with an initial investment of Rs 50,000 from Mustafa. He holds a 50 percent stake in the company while four of his cousins own the rest. What started in a 50 sq ft kitchen with a grinder, mixer and weighing machine soon turned into a Rs 2,000-crore company.

“We made plenty of mistakes along the way -- once our batter over-fermented and caused a blast in the store. We faced losses and went back to the drawing board,” Mustafa said.

After struggling for eight years and having invested all his savings, the company finally found investors. Now, iD Fresh Food has two production plants in Bengaluru and one each in Hyderabad, Chennai, Mumbai, Mangalore and Dubai. The company reported a 23.5 percent growth in revenue at Rs 294 crore in fiscal 2020-21, according to The Hindu BusinessLine.

Its products are available in 23,000 retail outlets in 35 cities in India, Oman, UAE and the US.

(Edited by : Shoma Bhattacharjee)