How WickedGüd plans to unjunk Indian kitchens
The maker of healthy noodles and pasta intends to eliminate kitchen staples that pack in lifestyle diseases. How will that bet play out?
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Last Updated: Oct 30, 2025, 10:53 IST5 min
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Bhuman Dani’s home would turn into a battlefield come snack time every day, with his wife and older son, four, crossing swords over what to eat. “Kids end up dictating consumer behaviour and mothers end up domesticating junk food. That’s the problem we wanted to solve,” says Dani, the founder of WickedGüd, makers of healthy noodles and pasta.
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Launched in 2021 with the mission statement ‘Unjunk India, One Kitchen At A Time’, WickedGüd was christened as a portmanteau of the two core ideas—wicked taste and good ingredients. The goal of its first products that rolled out in early 2022 was to eliminate from kitchen staples, like instant noodles and pasta, four elements that pack in lifestyle diseases: Flour, palm oil, sugar and chemicals.
The intersection of health and instant noodles is a space poised for explosive growth. According to a report by Mordor Intelligence, in 2025, the instant noodles market in India stands at $1,590 million, with a CAGR forecast of 13.39 percent. Another report by Data Bridge Market Research pegs the health food market at $35.89 million in 2024, and estimates it to grow to $139.56 million by 2032, at a CAGR of 18.5 percent.
But selling healthy food to Indians is easier said than done. It’s a lesson Dani had learnt during his first outing as an entrepreneur as the co-founder of TGL Co (The Good Life Company, a specialty tea and coffee brand). “In India, taste and price are primary, health is secondary,” he says. “So, health can drive repeat purchases, but first-time sales are always about taste and price.” Dani wanted to mimic the taste of the legacy brand that cornered more than half of the Indian market, but engineer it with, what he calls, better-for-you ingredients.
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The first product he rustled up was gluten-free pasta made with chickpea, red lentil, brown rice and tapioca starch. As much as Dani swore by the product, the consumers didn’t. “Most Indians cooked pasta in a pressure cooker, and without gluten, the binding agent, it turned into mush,” he says. In his next iteration, he added gluten in the form of durum wheat semolina to give it structure and taste, while still cutting down net carbs and saturated fat due to the presence of chickpeas, red lentil and brown rice.
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Similarly, his first batch of instant noodles—made of oats, lentils, brown rice and whole wheat using SCAD (steaming, convection, air drying) technology—failed to pass muster beyond premium consumers. Since Dani wanted to retail through general trade (the traditional, unorganised retail network), he tweaked its composition to 100 percent wheat flour and fried it in rice bran oil, instead of palm oil, which lowered saturated fat content when compared to regular noodles, without sacrificing taste. Today, noodles constitute 85 percent of his top line by volume, and plays a key role in making his revenues more than double from ₹3.5 crore in FY23 to ₹7.9 crore in FY24, according to Tracxn data (at present, Dani says, they clock a net revenue of ₹3 crore a month). “These experiences have taught me not to try and change the way the customers consume a product, just make a better product within the same consumption pattern,” says Dani.
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As of October 8, WickedGüd’s noodles was ranked No 3 among the bestselling noodles on Amazon, behind two variants of Nestle’s Maggi, the market leader. “In 2024, we launched cup noodles that has been a game changer for us. Now, we sell three to four lakh of those a month,” adds Dani. “In just 18 months, in Reliance Stores, we have 8 percent category share in cup noodles.”
To date, WickedGüd has raised ₹35 crore, and counts actor Shilpa Shetty as an investor. “Usually, founders are products people. Bhuman is a rare founder who understands marketing. He’s got Shetty on board, he’s got Elephant Design, which has done branding for products like Epigamia and Kurkure. These are savvy moves,” says Rehan Yar Khan, managing partner of Orios Venture Partners, which led a round of funding last year in which the company raised ₹20 crore.
Dani’s business canny also comes through in his focus on distribution—online, of course, but equally, offline. “Offline is where legacy brands are, so we have to get our offline game right,” says Dani. “Unlike other startups, who get 80 to 90 percent revenue from online and 10 to 20 percent from offline, ours is an even split. That makes us an omnichannel brand.” Dani has also been able to crack the difficult code of taking WickedGüd to the shelves of supermarkets like Reliance Fresh and DMart. “They don’t usually stock products of startups. But we are in 800-plus Reliance Fresh stores and going to go up to about 1,200 in the next six months.”
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“When he added instant noodles in his lineup, we felt it could be an exciting move as it’s a large space,” says Khan of Orios. “Part two is he is doing a healthy brand, which has a huge pull factor versus other incumbents, as we’ve seen with other healthy brands in our portfolio. In the next five to seven years, healthy is going to be a large category. That’s why we invested in his company.”
WickedGüd now has 20 SKUs; Dani says he has plans to expand, although he refuses to divulge details. “We will be close to breaking even in another 12 to 18 months. We want to break even before we reach the ₹100 crore ARR [annualised revenue rate],” he says.
But as the healthy category booms and newer players emerge, how does he plan to break the clutter? With the brand, he says. “From all the brands out there, we are probably the closest to the market leader when it comes to taste, while also being made of healthy ingredients. Our packaging stands out, and the photo of Shetty on the packet will build trust for the consumers.”
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In the next four to five years, his target is to build a ₹1,000 crore PAT-positive brand, and be India’s second- or third-largest noodle maker. For now, though, Dani can relish a personal victory: His kids are in love with his products and peace has finally returned to snack time at home.
First Published: Oct 30, 2025, 11:07
Subscribe NowKathakali has been a journalist for nearly two decades, working previously with The Telegraph and Times of India. An MA in political science and a Chevening Fellow, she is a feature writer covering th
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