Our Story
I’m from Bangladesh, I’m in first time in 2012, 12 years ago. I was Very Young, I was 22 years old.
It’s from a place of love and affection for this country and its people that I decided to spend more than a decade of my life building a business that I hope can help improve the quality of life in this country.
My co-founder and I saw two really big trends. The first was that people in Bangladesh every year are eating more and more packaged food, chips, chocolate, candy, and also that they have more and more strong preferences for high-quality imported products. But at the same time, they want to pay local prices.
The second trend we saw is that whenever we would go to a store, we would see lots of new products, lots of new high-quality products, but never anything with nutrition. Never anything that you could honestly say was good for somebody.
We started this company to combine growing preference changes in Bangladesh for high-quality products at great prices with offering something that was nutritious.
So we have two brands. Hashikushi is our first brand. And Hashikushi in Bangla, as you all know, represents a feeling that you get when something really wonderful happens, when you eat something really delicious, when you see someone that you really love.
And so by naming the product Hashikushi, our consumers and our customers to have that feeling whenever they see our products or eat our products.
Nutri+ is a slightly different brand, and Nutri+ simply represents a solution for families. Parents want their children to eat things that are nutritious. Children want to eat things that are delicious.
Frequently, those are not the same thing. But when you try Nutri+ products, they are. You can have things that are truly delicious, import quality, but that also provide the nutrition that a child or that a family needs to be healthy, smart, and strong.
The biggest challenge has been brand recognition. Most of the products and companies that are successful in Bangladesh have been around for 20, 30, 40 years, and we’ve only been in the market for five years.
It’s hard for a family to trust something that they may have never heard of. That’s really where most of our energy is going, is to make people aware of who we are at Care Nutrition and what our brands and products stand for.
The single most important value for us as a company is the quality of our products. It is core to our mission, and it’s also what helps differentiate us from many other brands in the country and in the world, honestly.
We’ve gone through the process of receiving ISO 20000 2018 certification, which is the highest standard of certification for food production, both from Bangladesh Standards and Testings Institute and also from SGS International.
We’re the only company in Bangladesh to have ISO 20000 2018 from both of those bodies. In order to get those certifications, there’s incredibly high standards that you have to achieve.
One of the ways that we ensure those standards is that we have our own microbiological and chemical labs at our factory. Every single raw material or packaging material that comes into our factory is tested, and every single finished good that goes out of the factory is also tested across a whole range of parameters.
We use products like sugar and oil and lentils, and all of those products are imported in Bangladesh. Bangladesh produces very little oil, very little sugar. Even lentils, which are part of the daily diet, are actually imported. We use a range of more than 100 different raw materials, and about 95% of those are imported from abroad.
We’ve been incredibly fortunate and had the privilege of partnering with a range of different organizations for different projects and different priorities. We recently received investment from the government of Bangladesh through Startup Bangladesh Limited.We recently received a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to do work on prototyping products for pregnant and lactating women.
We also have two clinical trials that are currently operating. One in partnership with ICD-DRB and the Bangladesh National Nutrition Service, as well as UNICEF, and that’s working with small children. And then we have another clinical trial that’s working with pregnant and lactating women in partnership with Johns Hopkins University in the US, as well as an organization called Givita here locally.
We’ve also partnered with other much larger brands to help them develop products. So we’ve recently launched products with Olympic, with SMC, with Dan Foods, with Army Pharma. So we see our mission not just to bring our own brands, but also to help improve the quality and nutritional content of food sold by other brands as well.
Good nutrition is one of the key building blocks for a healthy life. And like some of those other building blocks, like education and like exercise, it’s a lifelong journey. You can’t solve it in one day or one week. And so we see the role of so many people in society to support good nutrition for families.
That’s policymakers, that’s teachers. But we also see a role for private companies to develop and provide solutions that make it easier for parents and for families and for teachers and for policymakers to help improve nutrition.
We believe that all families deserve nutritious options that fit their budgets and also meet their taste preferences. We started this company to essentially provide families with delicious foods that they love to eat, that also provide them with the nutrition that they need to be healthy, strong, and smart.
I’m from Bangladesh, I’m in first time in 2012, 12 years ago. I was Very Young, I was 22 years old. And from the moment that I arrived, this country and the people of this country have been so incredibly welcoming and kind. As I grew and gained experience, this country gave me opportunities that I could have never imagined.
Now Bangladesh is my home. So I want to develop business in Bangladesh