This Greenpreneur Is Helping India Grow Nutrition at Home, One F-Sheet at a Time

Pavithra says that we’ve commonly heard how food can be the true medicine, and yet, due to the presence of chemicals, fertilisers and more, our food today is hardly as healthy as it should be. Thus, her solution provides a method for people to grow their own food, in a nutritious manner, at home.

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The product married modern design, sustainability and her respect for nature. A greenpreneur who helps people make better food choices, Pavithra Ravi’s entrepreneurial venture focuses on bringing healthy food from the farm to the table.

Pavithra Ravi’s Journey of Making F-sheet

Hailing from Coimbatore, she is a researcher by profession. During Covid, seeing people suffer and their health steadily deteriorate, she wanted to do something using her skills to help society. She and her husband had been studying nutrition in India prior to that, and discovered that nutrition is almost like a luxury in India.

Around 100 crore people in India don’t get adequate nutrition, she highlighted during her pitch on the Her Start-up Show. Children dying of malnutrition and pregnant women suffering from anaemia played on her mind, urging her to find a solution.

That’s when she came across the idea of making an F-sheet – a product that’ll enable people to grow their own greens.

F-sheet is a natural, biodegradable fibre sheet.

The process of making an F-sheet entails processing husk in the lab. Then, it is washed, soaked and neutralised, to ensure that there are no chemicals or sugar present. It is then air dried, shredded and processed in the mill.

The F-sheet wasn’t developed only to grow microgreens. The sheet ensures that the maximum amount of nutrients is retained by the plants.

Pavithra works with women’s self-help groups, and she’s able to provide employment for them through her venture.

F-sheet on Her Startup Show

Pavithra’s team at present makes 50 sheets a day, and their motivation to come on the show was to secure funding and scale up to making 500 sheets or more each day. Presently, the sheets are handmade, and thus, she said in her pitch that she needed INR 20 lakhs to set up machinery for the production unit.

On the show, Pavithra explained how the cost of each sheet is high right now, at Rs. 30, but she can bring that down when she uses machinery to make them. She also explained how the product compares to other similar ones available in the market.

Impressed with her story, the jury gave Pavirthra a grant of 10 lakh rupees on the show.

GroupM Motion Entertainment and Mindshare, in collaboration with Britannia and digital partner HerZindagi, have unveiled Season 2 of 'Her Startup Show'—India’s first and only national reality series dedicated solely to women entrepreneurs. It is now streaming on JioHotstar.