Hyderabad-based entrepreneur Vishala Reddy Vuyyala has announced Decode Millet, a 16-month project that aims to connect with a million corporate sector employees in eight cities. Through presentations, fun cooking sessions and pop-ups, she hopes to motivate more people to shed their resistance to consuming millets. “The year 2023, observed as the International Year of Millets, saw the active participation of start-ups and micro-processing units, which benefited everyone in the value chain including farmers and producer organisations. There is a need to sustain the momentum for at least five years to ensure continuous consumer engagement,” says Vishala, who founded Millet Bank and Minkan Agro Industries Pvt Ltd (with Priyanka Barathwaj).
Decode Millet plans to reach employees of 150 corporate houses in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Delhi NCR, Chennai, Kolkata, Pune, Mumbai and Ahmedabad. “There have been focussed studies on the health risks faced by the corporate sector, especially the IT sector, owing to their lifestyles and we believe that consuming millets can help promote better health. I discovered that a leading IT campus has nearly 80,000 employees. So this is an ideal sector to take the millet discourse forward,” says Vishala, adding that the first step is to try and remove the notion that millets are not tasty.
