VMPL
New Delhi [India], June 25: India's long-standing protein deficiency challenge is increasingly drawing attention from nutrition experts, policymakers, and health-conscious consumers alike. While supplements and have flooded the market over the last decade, a Salem-based startup is taking a different approach - one that starts not with powders or pills, but with the foods Indians already eat every day.
Most Indians know white rice isn't a very nutritious option. Diabetics know it better than anyone; their doctors tell them at every visit. And yet Indians won't give it up. Not because we're stubborn, but because rice isn't just food to us. It's comfort, cultural, and the centre of every meal. Ask someone to swap it for millets, quinoa or even brown rice, and the conversation often ends there.
Indians don't want supplements unless a doctor prescribes them. We want nutrition to come from our food, and without compromising on taste.
Achyuth Kumar spent years wondering about this culturally innate behavior, and the answer took him in a direction the nutrition industry wasn't expecting.
Rather than fighting that behavior, he decided to work with it.
The Idea: Fix the Food, Not the Person
Instead of building another supplement brand - the easier, more obvious path, Achyuth asked a different, far harder question: "what if we could make the staple foods Indians already eat genuinely more nutritious. And without changing how they taste or cook?"
His answer was RealNutriCo, a nutrition startup from Salem, Tamilnadu built on a single, clear conviction: supplements shouldn't be necessary if your food is doing its job. The brand's tagline says it plainly: Real Nutrition, Not an Illusion.
What followed was over a year of intensive research and development. The challenge wasn't just nutritional, it was sensory. Any change that altered the taste, texture, aroma, or cooking behaviour of rice or dal would be dead on arrival. Indians would know immediately, and we would not forgive it.
Hyper Rice: The Product That Started It All
RealNutriCo launched 1.5 years ago with a single product: Hyper Rice, now fully patented. Compared to regular white rice, it delivers twice the protein, five times the fibre, 13% fewer carbohydrates, and over sixteen vitamins and minerals, all without any change to taste or cooking method. It looks like white rice. It cooks like white rice. It tastes like white rice. The nutrition, however, is in a different league.
The launch came with a genuine question hanging over it: would people embrace this, or dismiss it as processed food dressed up in health packaging? The supplement industry had spent decades conditioning people to distrust any real food that sounded too good to be true. A rice that's nutritionally superior but tastes identical? It sounded like a misleading marketing claim, not a real product.
But the reality seems to be different. Thousands of Indian families have since made Hyper Rice a part of their daily meals, getting meaningfully better nutrition through the dishes they were already cooking - dal chawal, pulao, khichdi, idli, dosa, without a single recipe change.
For those managing blood sugar, the Hyper Rice Sugar Control variant goes further, with a very low Glycemic Index of just 43, making it one of the few rice options genuinely suitable for diabetics who aren't willing to give up rice-based meals. Which, in India, is most of them.
Hyper Dal: Completing the Plate
Encouraged by the reception to Hyper Rice, RealNutriCo expanded into the other half of India's most iconic meal combination - dal. Hyper Dal is available in three varieties: Toor, Masoor, and Chana. Each delivers 45% more protein than its regular counterpart, with lesser carbohydrates, a lower glycemic index, and reduced bloating, cooked the same way, tasting the same, fitting into the same recipes.
Dal tadka, sambar, khichdi, bisibelebath, dal chawal - Hyper Dal works in all of them, seamlessly fitting into the Indian kitchen's pantry.
The Number That Changes the Conversation
Individually, each of the products are a meaningful upgrade. Together, they fundamentally shift what a single Indian meal can deliver nutritionally.
A combination of Hyper Rice and Hyper Dal through a dish like a Dal-Chawal or Dal Kichdi claims to provide roughly 54% more protein than the same meal when made with regular rice and regular dal. This is a significant and meaningful increase, all done with no supplements, no powders, and no extra effort.
This matters for the whole family, not just the health-conscious adult in the household. From children to elders, every person can eat the same meal and get more protein and fewer carbohydrates, a win-win
A Different Kind of Nutrition Company
RealNutriCo claims all its products are plant-based, non-GMO, and free from additives, sweeteners and preservatives - ingredients common in supplements. They are built to integrate into existing food habits, not replace them, which is precisely what makes them unusual in a nutrition industry that has long profited from asking people to do more, spend more, and eat differently.
The goal, as Achyuth sees it, was never to build another nutrition brand. It was to make nutrition brands unnecessary.
For a country where protein deficiency persists till today, where cultural attachment to food is as strong as anywhere in the world, and where the supplement aisle has offered solutions that most people quietly ignore, that might be exactly the right idea at exactly the right time.
Explore RealNutriCo's products here: https://realnutri.co/pages/products
(ADVERTORIAL DISCLAIMER: The above press release has been provided by VMPL. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of the same.)
