A first-of-its-kind NFT economy game, OneRare, cofounded by Supreet Raju and Gaurav Gupta, collaborates with celebrity chefs, iconic restaurants, popular cooking shows and food brands to mint NFTs of their iconic dishes, and is bringing the global food industry to Web3
Gaurav Gupta and Supreet Raju (sitting), Cofounders, OneRare
It all started with French fries. On a chilly morning in January last year, Gaurav Gupta was busy giving finishing touches to his blockchain-based infrastructure project. An engineer who has had stints in growth marketing for businesses such as Labster and Phllips, and had led the blockchain developer programme for Dash Network before venturing on his own as independent consultant, Gupta was confident that he was onto something massive. Eager to get an outside perspective, he asked his wife about her take.
Supreet Raju, though, was brutally candid. “This is all nonsense,” she said. A NIFT (National Institute of Fashion Technology) graduate, Raju always believed that tech-heavy concepts such as blockchain and NFTs (non-fungible tokens) acted as deterrent in terms of understanding. “I used to run away from the drawing room to avoid the conversation,” she recalls. For somebody who always focussed on creating simplistic designs to enable mass adoption, tech-loaded jargons and complex interface never made sense to her. “Why can’t we build something simple just like French fries?” she asked. “It’s easy to make, and great to consume.”
The thought stuck with Gupta. It was during the same time that the secondary market value of CryptoPunks, a series of 10,000 images tokenised as NFTs on the ethereum blockchain, started to shoot through the roof. As a designer, Raju got curious, and the couple decided to start something of their own. Since food was the common link between the techie and the designer, the duo decided to explore the culinary world. “Food is a universal language, and you don’t need to be geeky to understand it,” says Raju, who co-founded OneRare in November 2021.
The world’s first food metaverse, OneRare is bringing the global food industry to Web3 in a gamified manner. It is a first-of-its-kind NFT economy game that runs on cooperation and trade between play-to-earn gamers and NFT collectors. OneRare, Gupta underlines, is collaborating with celebrity chefs, iconic restaurants, popular cooking shows and food brands to mint NFTs for their iconic dishes. “We have announced collaboration with chefs such as Saransh Goila and Zorawar Kalra,” he says, adding that the startup has also tied up with Michelin star chef Anthony Sarpong, MasterChef Australia contestant Reynold Poernomo, and other chefs from across the globe. In terms of restaurants, OneRare has started collaborating with brands from the US.
(This story appears in the 17 June, 2022 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)