I was very excited to see this but after looking at the nutrition details, I was dismayed.
Upma 1 serving has 660 mg of sodium. Khichdi has 1760 mg of sodium. The daily requirement is 2300 mg of Sodium and if you are hyper tensive the requirements are lesser. Is there a reason it has such a high sodium content?
The pricing also seems high to me. I think your should rethink pricing. For staple items like khichdi, upma you should drop the pricing. I am confident that you will make it up with volume. If you price staple breakfast and dinner items too high, you will drive away your core customer base of Indian students. You want Indian students to buy your items in bulk for a month. Will a Indian student spend 200 dollars per month (20 * 10 (1 khichdi + 1 upma)) on your food items? You can use these staple items as lead gen tools to establish a long term relationship with your customers.
Sometimes food is prepared for flavor, based on a consensus of what tastes the best.
If more people affirm that a given recipe is the most desirable, it would be completely ridiculous to impose a lesser recipe upon the menu, if it sells poorly.
I can easily prepare low sodium pretzels, and try to sell them at the county fair, but what good would that do, if every passer by takes one look at my pretzels and asks, “Where’s the salt?”
Then I’m selling maybe 90% fewer pretzels, but wow! Look at the complements I get from those one or two people who appreciate the effort, but still don’t necessarily buy anything.
If three or four people out of one hundred are apt to complain about a detail like sodium, that the rest happily ignore, then keep the preferred recipe, and offer a separate low-sodium menu, optionally.
We know that high sodium intake is a leading cause of high blood pressure which in turn leads to heart disease. I also don't buy products with high levels of sodium and I think this is true of a growing number of people as awareness spreads of the issue.
I read the OP as explaining why they won't currently buy the product, but what might change their mind in the future. Further, what's the problem with holding companies to a high standard? If the world consumed less salt health would improve.
>This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine—an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous.... Intersalt, a large study published in 1988, compared sodium intake with blood pressure in subjects from 52 international research centers and found no relationship between sodium intake and the prevalence of hypertension. In fact, the population that ate the most salt, about 14 grams a day, had a lower median blood pressure than the population that ate the least, about 7.2 grams a day. In 2004 the Cochrane Collaboration, an international, independent, not-for-profit health care research organization funded in part by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, published a review of 11 salt-reduction trials. Over the long-term, low-salt diets, compared to normal diets, decreased systolic blood pressure (the top number in the blood pressure ratio) in healthy people by 1.1 millimeters of mercury (mmHg) and diastolic blood pressure (the bottom number) by 0.6 mmHg. That is like going from 120/80 to 119/79. The review concluded that "intensive interventions, unsuited to primary care or population prevention programs, provide only minimal reductions in blood pressure during long-term trials." A 2003 Cochrane review of 57 shorter-term trials similarly concluded that "there is little evidence for long-term benefit from reducing salt intake."
I am well aware of this because I have a hormone problem causing me to retain salt. So it isn't theoretical for me - I have to be extremely anal about it or else blood pressure medicine won't do me any good.
However what it boils down to in practice is that I've learned to not even ask whether you have a low-sodium menu. Because you probably don't, and even if you do, your idea of low-sodium is still way too much for what my body can take.
My solution is to only eat food prepared from scratch, or eat at specific restaurants where I can choose the exact ingredients that went into my meal. There is no point in restaurants trying to cater to people like me, because if they did I'd have no way to hear about it.
I'm serious about that. Advertising won't work because I've learned that advertising is misleading. "Reduced salt" means 25% less than a comparable product, which had several times what I could accept. Offering "healthy salads" won't sway me because I've learned the hard way that their salt content is usually just as high in practice as a burger and fries.
There are only two phrases that I respond to. "No salt added" and "Raw ingredients." If you're less restrictive than that, you're probably consuming too much salt. Even though you think that you're being good. So much so that if a normal person tries to eat what I eat, their first thought is going to be that the food tastes awful and needs more salt.
Incidentally for the record, our recommended daily allowance is 1500 mg, which is around 1/4 tsp of salt. Most adults in the USA eat more than double that. If you eat out every other day, you almost certainly are getting a lot more than most adults.
Thank you for your suggestions, and appreciate your concerns.
- Sodium comes directly from the spices of the recipes. We don't add any for preservation or any other reasons, but we are currently working on low-sodium options for all of our meals!
- Our pricing is based on the cost it takes to produce each dish. We make everything from scratch just as the home recipe calls for and include fresh vegetables, seasoning, spices, etc. Our products are more comparable to restaurant meals ($7-10) than instant meals ($2-4), although we fall closer to the instant/microwaveable meals range ($4-6).
- Bulk options is a great idea and something we will definitely consider!
I was under the impression a) the relationship between salt and hypertension is far from understood and b) the daily value is likely lower than is supported by evidence.
As a home cook, things taste much better with salt, and they preserve better. Both are desired here in a packaged meal.
Furthermore this allows introducing a low sodium variant for those looking for it.
Seems like a perfectly fine amount of sodium to me.
"An estimated sodium intake between 3 g per day and 6 g per day was associated with a lower risk of death and cardiovascular events than either a higher or lower estimated level of sodium intake."
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1311889
I agree on the sodium. There are alternatives like Good Salt which taste good (not all of them do!), which cut sodium terrifically and can basically be cloned for bulk production.
I haven't tried any, but the Chana Masala looks pretty reasonable, and has lots of protein! Put it over some whole grain rice, and I bet it would be pretty filling. (I'm sure you could say that for all of these meals).
Upma 1 serving has 660 mg of sodium. Khichdi has 1760 mg of sodium. The daily requirement is 2300 mg of Sodium and if you are hyper tensive the requirements are lesser. Is there a reason it has such a high sodium content?
The pricing also seems high to me. I think your should rethink pricing. For staple items like khichdi, upma you should drop the pricing. I am confident that you will make it up with volume. If you price staple breakfast and dinner items too high, you will drive away your core customer base of Indian students. You want Indian students to buy your items in bulk for a month. Will a Indian student spend 200 dollars per month (20 * 10 (1 khichdi + 1 upma)) on your food items? You can use these staple items as lead gen tools to establish a long term relationship with your customers.