Away from the glare and noise of social media, there are seven souls that run Bio Basics.
Knowing your food also means knowing them too.
When we started Bio Basics, the goals were the betterment of consumer health, farmer incomes and ecological purity.
While all these still remain our goals and we strive hard to accomplish these in our own small way,
the team we put together and empowered over the past 11 years has become a point of pride for us.
And their betterment too matters to us now.
Seven youngsters who are NOT into social media (believe it or not!).
All living within 5 km of our workplace in Vadavalli, Coimbatore.
All Tamil speaking. All comfortable with a smattering of English. No Hindi, yet.
All from modest backgrounds, first-generation office goers in their respective families.
All of them together run Bio Basics.
Day-to-day. Day after day.
Helping them financially, especially in times of health crises, is just one of the ways we feel like we are one small Bio Basics family.
Youngsters falling sick is not fun at all.
With one of them still grappling with a serious ailment, the entire team (or shall we say, our family?) is currently on tenterhooks.
The team needs a lot more training and coaching for them to deliver top-quality service, but they have that learnability and sincerity to deliver.
So our efforts are more targeted at creating systems and processes for them to follow.
And letting them take ownership of their areas.
Operations
Gnanaselvam leads the operations team, managing people, processes and everything in between.
Prashant takes care of sourcing. He has become an expert on products (60 varieties of rices, for instance), and has close relationships with our farmers.
Jayakumar, the latest hire from 3 years ago, interfaces between the CRM team and the Ops team, ensuring flawless fulfilment.
Shruti, the youngest of them all, having been with us the longest (9 years!) manages the packing operations.
Customer Relations
Manikandan takes care of the interface with logistics partners, our website, and is always diligent with dealing with issues that consumers face.
Tamilkani cares for the local Coimbatore families, delivering top-quality fresh produce without fail twice a week.
Back Office:
Unnikrishnan deals with accounts, finance, compliance and a whole lot more.
All of us meet once a month to share thoughts, updates and (not-so-organic) vadais.
And once a year, individually, to reflect on the year and how we can do better.
Sure, there are balls that are dropped, mistakes that embarass us all, but hardly out of lack of sincerity.
And there is this immediate apology and drive to do better next time.
Youngsters, learning to run an organization, imbibing the ethics of Bio Basics and aligning to the cause of safe food & good health.
Strangely, for us Founders, the team, which was brought together to serve a larger cause, has become a goal in itself.
Like they say, sometimes, the "means become an end in themselves".
