Detroit is on the comeback trail, no doubt. But we believe that
the health equality is the key to fight the income and educational inequality -
the 3 components of the social inequality. Specially it becomes more relevant
for Detroit if you think of its 500 K out of 700 K populace living in the food
desert. Michigan recently slipped from 8th to 15th among
the fattest states in the nation. But we did not do anything as our combined
obesity and overweight prevalence still hovers around 70%. Other states got
fatter.
Our sole focus is to make
people healthy and the healthy people make a city great not only jobs. The
obesity kills the people 15-18 years early leave aside the impact on our
day-to-day life in terms of lost job hours, kids missing schools and other
normal activities.Though they are not on CDC's chart like the heart disease or
Cancer. Please visit our websites at www.nirmalindiancuisine.com, www.DisruptiveEating.com and the Twitter handle @NirmalCurry to know more about us and our concept.
It took us almost a year to devise 3 tools for #WarOnObesity in
Detroit.
Our first tool for fight against the obesity and overweight is
the packaged and HPPed curry in 8 oz ($3) and 16 oz ($5) which we plan to
launch by Jan 2017. This would be a first HPPed Indian food anywhere in the
world (patent pending). HPP is the high pressure pasteurization which does not
use any preservative and keeps Curry good for 75-80 days in the refrigerator
against 10 days for non-HPP curry. Indian food uses 200 seasonings ingredients
out of 381 known so far and HPP keeps the original flavor of Curry intact. HPP
can reduce the food waste at both ends - the grocers and the customers.
We plan to place our packaged curry into Save-a-lots, Dollar
generals, Aldis, the local grocers and also Krogers, Meijers, the Whole Foods
of the world. By using all type of stores we hope to catch the attention of our
target low income and the non-college educated populace. We want to position
Indian food as a tastier, cheaper and healthier alternative to the tacos,
burgers and pizzas. Indian food now is
consumed by the middle-income and the college educated people, only 5% of the
population. HPP enables us to reach out to the stores like Dollar Generals or
Save-a-Lots as we can place our products with ‘pay as you sell’ option. There are 3500 Indian restaurants all over the
US and the packaged Indian food is now available at the Costcos, the Whole
Foods, Meijers, Krogers, not at the local or low-cost stores.
These curry are not ready to eat meals and it comes with a
recipe book. Or the patrons can go to our website to watch the videos how to
use it. We want to promote the home cooking to make healthy eating (read more
whole grain and less meat) more affordable. These curry are basically
'seasoning in liquid form.' and you can use it in so many ways. Once we launch
our curry, we plan to do the cooking classes in the food desert localities in
Detroit specially at the Church kitchens, the apartment complexes, the
community halls to dispel myths about the Indian food. The biggest myth to
dispel –Spices or any seasoning don't make food spicy (read Hot), the Chili
does like in any other cuisine.
Our idea is 'Disruptive Eating' and we want to disrupt the way
people eat or drink now. USDA does recommend about almost 1/3rd of calories
coming from the grain (6 ounces) and 50% of that grain should be whole grain.
On the average, people here are not eating even 15% whole grain on average and
I can suspect the low income people may be eating much less. In Asian or Indian
diet, we get 50% calories from the grain (USDA also does recommend getting
around 50% calories from Carb) and eating parboiled rice or whole wheat bread
could not be so bad as it made out to be. Like for Asians here in US have the
obesity rate of 12% against 36% for the general population and the Asians are
the highest income group in the US.
One example of our ideal meal. For a family of 4 including 2
kids - 2 lbs of parboiled rice ($2), 2 cans of kidney beans, 15 Oz each ($2)
mixed with 16 Oz of our Curry ($5) - the complete meal for lunch or dinner with
requisite protein- total $9 for whole family, it is less than 2 toppings 2 large
sized pizzas in $15 for lunch or dinner. Our option is much healthier, tastier
and cheaper. Tastier is much important component as normally we want to
substitute the meat options with the baked vegetables, soups or salads. And
that is not working. Once people start eating whole grain, naturally they would
eat less meat. Also the grain is the cheapest source of calories and the plant
proteins like lentils, legumes, tofu, nutri-gget (both made from soyabean) are
the cheapest source of protein. Detroit with 500K food insecure people out of
700K population needs cheaper options.
The second tool is the brick and mortar restaurant which we have
at Ypsilanti now and we want to locate one at Detroit. We are the ‘Space
Awardee’ at Motor City Match awards in round 4 and Brightmoor Nirmal would be
our first real ‘Nirmal.’ Two things we
want to demonstrate at our cafe. Our flagship item Food Box in $5 with 5 items
proves that Indian food is not elite and second the direct messaging. Nirmal
may be only restaurant now in Michigan with #SodaFree and #OnlyWholeWheat items
and our principle is simple - we need to restrict access to bad food along with
the access to the healthy food. The choice of personal freedom has become the
freedom to let people suffer.
Cities can promote such restaurants by not charging the food
license fees, or the utility companies like DTE giving 50% off or the local
banks giving interest free loans. If we want to make a healthy community, everyone
needs to pitch in. Soda companies are tough nut to crack as Philadelphia became
only 2nd city in the US to impose #SodaTax recently. Also #SodaTax may be good
first step but its impact is minimal as evident from Mexico’s example. #SodaFree
is about individual restaurant owners and we don’t think majority of us won’t
prefer to serve unhealthy items like Soda, the most acidic drink, to our fellow
community members. See link ~ http://flatulencecures.com/is-soda-acidic
.
A ‘Checkers’ restaurant opened last week just across the road
from Nirmal in Ypsilanti. There were long line of cars almost whole day for the
first 3-4 days. I was kind of bemused like we have Wendy, McDonald, Burger King
on the same road within 500 meters. I got my Checkers burgers too eventually
after a week. Definitely they are less costly than others but one thing
bothered me again – they don’t even ask for whole wheat bread option, same as
others. How many of us know:
1.
Just switching to
Whole wheat bread reduces the risk of heart disease by 20% and Heart disease is
No 1 killer here
2.
Or one whole wheat
bread is equal to 8 white breads
3.
Or white breads like
sugar are used for measurement of the glycemic index (GI)
4.
Or Parboiled rice is
better than Brown rice, read my earlier post, Slow Carb vs Low Carb
See link here ~http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=faq&dbid=32
and read ‘Why whole wheat’ at our website.
We have huge information gap and Nirmal café may be effective to
bridge that gap in conjunction with the city officials, the community leaders
and other stake-holders.
The third tool for #WarOnObesity is our unique mobile App. The
users can earn the points for eating healthy which could be converted into
the discounts for buying Nirmal curry and the healthy items from the
participating vendors. This would be only App which would monitor how much
grain/whole grain you are eating, how much protein from which source not only
calories. It would award bonus points for the home cooking or skipping soda or
meat for a day. We want to give people a purpose to #EatRight and to be a part
of the fight against the global warming, the poverty and the hunger.
Our aim is simple. To reduce the fatness index (prevalence of
obesity and overweight) by 25% in Detroit by 2020. Once we have proof of
concept in Detroit, then we can venture for our regional and national
expansion. But we need lot of resources and the support from everyone to pull
this off. This has potential to reduce the health care costs drastically.
We are honored to be short-listed as a participating venture at
ACE (Annual Collaboration of Entrepreneurs) 2017 on 26th Jan 2017.
We are only food vendor among 25 ventures selected but our impact is far
reaching and goes much further. We need your votes at ACE to bring 3 things at
the center stage in Michigan – the fight against obesity, HPP and the Indian
food – exactly in the same order. Are you in?
