Achiever's Success Story
"A new age entrepreneur and empathetic leader with over a decade of experience in building world class consumer brands in the the retail and tech domain."
Apurva Anand is a first generation serial entrepreneur. He is an international MBA from Asian Institute of Management, Manila and was elected as the chairman of the students association at AIM. He was honoured with the prestigious ‘Student Leadership Award’ for his leadership skills at the international institute in the Philippines. He also underwent the ‘Asian Immersion Program’ at SolBridge International Business School, South Korea. He completed his engineering from Manipal Institute of Technology, Karnataka and is an alumnus of Loyola School, Jamshedpur.
He has been attributed with bringing to life several popular new-age consumer products and services in the retail and technology domain. He has previously worked with international and national companies such as Coca-Cola, Hector Beverages (Paper Boat), Mobikwik before launching his second venture as a Co-Founder at Forbidden Foods.
Apurva is an ex-national level swimmer and loves his food. He conceptualized and launched a health food venture nearly a decade back. Consumers found the concept of Indian food as a healthy way of life refreshing and highly appreciated the brand. The demand for his food & beverage products gained momentum and he started selling his products from several other retail stores in Delhi NCR in addition to the company owned outlets.
Couple of years later, he teamed up with like-minded people who were about to launch the beverage brand ‘Paper Boat’ which is today a household name. The concept was similar to Apurva’s first venture and he eventually spearheaded the brand’s business nationally.
Post demonetization, he was appointed as Director of Pan-India Operations at the Indian FinTech company Mobikwik. He was instrumental in helping more than 1.5 million merchants accept digital payments seamlessly via the Mobikwik app. Later, he was picked up for launching Coca-Cola’s global beverage portfolio in India. Monster, Smartwater, Schweppes were few of the international brands of Coca-Cola that Apurva was instrumental in setting up in India which earned him multiple accolades during his stint.
Most recently, Apurva with his co-founding team at Forbidden Foods has launched India’s first popped chips brand – BRB. The novel products are neither baked nor fried but ‘popped’. In fact, the products are first of its kind in the Indian market. Though they are made in Belgium currently but the team will soon have a manufacturing set-up in India as well. The brand BRB is an acronym for ‘Be Right Back’ and targets GenZ consumers who happen to be digital natives and are the largest and the youngest consumer segment in both India and globally.