Abhay Rangan, a Watson Institute scholar, was featured in Forbes for his vegan milk company.
Eighteen months ago Abhay Rangan, a 21-year-old engineering student, was traveling 500km every week on his moped throughout Bangalore in southern India with a backpack full of plant-based milks he and his mother had made in their home kitchen. Not only was this delivery method inefficient, the products weren’t shelf-stable, resulting in many of them spoiling before reaching their destination.
“It was a difficult job,” Rangan admits. “We manufactured our first few thousand liters using our blenders, pots and pans. The challenge was that we were too small to outsource things like manufacturing to someone else, so we had to redo several orders when, for example, the almond milk spoiled before it got to the customer.”
This was the scrappy beginning of Veganarke, the company Rangan founded after starting and running a nonprofit animal rights organization for two years when he was just 16. “We were a bunch of teenagers in different Indian cities doing campaigns for veganism on the streets,” he explains. “A common argument I came across was that the vegan alternatives were expensive. I looked around and there were very few exclusively vegan businesses that were accessible to me on a student budget. Veganarke was born out of a desire to make vegan products affordable and accessible to everyone.”
