In this origin story of Khaas, we listen from Habibul Mustafa, co-founder, and Chairman of Khaas Food, how Khaas came into being and evolved into what it is today. This story is an excerpt from our interview with Mr. Arman published in 2017.
Food adulteration is a major problem in our society today. It has become so rampant that it is hard to find food products that are additives and formalin free. The system has, to some extent, failed to ensure food safety for a growing urban population. Although people often complain about it, there are not many viable solutions or alternatives.
This has become one of the biggest problems for us. It is more like slow poisoning. We have already started to see an outburst of diseases like cancer, diabetes and many other similar critical ailments that were not there just a couple of decades ago. I believe food has a big role to play here.
Not only that, if you look at our older generation, they are still active and even healthier than us in many instances. Part of this can be attributed to the quality of the food we consume. You can’t fully emphasize the importance of quality food, despite the fact, for a growing urban population, pure food is becoming an increasingly rare item.
Since we are also sufferers of this problem, we thought why don’t we try to solve this problem. That’s how Khaas Food came into existence. The idea is to provide people with pure food products, free of adulteration and harmful chemicals.
In the past one year, we have been able to serve a small but growing community of customers who buy our products and in the coming years, our plan is to get into organic food that will be produced completely in a natural manner without any harmful fertilizer, pesticides or anything.
We first started thinking about Khaas Food in early 2015 and started a small scale operation later that year but it was that – small. We finally got into full-fledged operation in early 2016 and have been doing well since then.
We are three founders, I (Chairman), Tauhidul Islam (Managing Director), and Abu Shahed (Chief Operating Officer), we are all from Dhaka University and working full time now, and invested our savings into this. We also took help from friends and families. Initially, we started with only BDT 0.20 million as capital.
The early days were interesting and difficult as well. We started using Tauhid’s house as our first office and warehouse. In fact, it was everything. After receiving an order, we used to pack the products and deliver ourselves.
Three of us have the experience of sourcing products, packaging and doing the delivery. Gradually orders started to pick up and our stock too. Then we realized that we couldn’t afford to use Tauhid house anymore. In August 2015, we rent a single room as our first office and hired 02 new staff to do the delivery and other things.
Then we added another room in January 2016 as the operations continued to grow. Initially, we only dealt with Honey, dry fish, Black seed oil, Ghee and some other spice items. We moved to our current location in March 2016. Today, we are a team of 18 people with added locations for our operation.
Updates on Khaas Food
Over the past years, Khaas Food has seen meaningful growth. The company expanded both verticals and geographies it covers and it has expanded into physical retail. Read most recent coverage of Khaas Food below:
