At 62, This Guwahati Mom Turned Homemade Barfi & Snacks Into a Rs 2.5 Lakh/Month Business

Step into the Agarwals’ kitchen, and you will notice several pairs of hands working together to make a batch of besan barfi.

The right amount of besan (gram flour), jaggery, and most importantly, ghee and nuts go into each batch.

We took a bite of this barfi made by the team, and there was a burst of flavour. The besan was well roasted; every bite was soft, with the occasional crunch of nuts and the richness of ghee binding it all together. 

At the heart of the barfi is Sunita Agarwal’s recipe.

At 62, Sunita has spent much of her life cooking for her family as a homemaker who loved making sweets and savouries. “Since childhood, I was always fond of making sweets and snacks,” she says.

For years, she made them for her children. She occasionally bought sweets from outside, but often felt that the quality was not what she wanted for her family. 

“So I started making it for them,” she says.

As her children grew older and she found herself with more time, Sunita continued doing something she had always loved: meeting friends and family and sharing food with them. 

Whenever she made something with her own hands, people around her liked it. Slowly, a thought began to take shape.

“Why not make this a business?” she wondered.

That thought eventually became Kitchen and Gupshup (K&G) in 2022.

When four homemade favourites became a biz 

In 2022, Sunita started K&G as a home kitchen with just four items: besan barfi (gram flour fudge), gond barfi (edible gum sweet), masala channa daal (spiced roasted gram) and Mathris (crispy savoury crackers). 

By 2024, the venture had expanded to 30+ SKUs across Savoury and Sweet and officially started running the business from a commercial kitchen while continuously expanding their menu items and adhering to standard food safety and standard measures.

Initially, the business focused only on Guwahati. The family spent the next year serving customers there and gaining confidence from the positive feedback they received. 

Around this time, Sunita’s son, Rajvardhan, joined her in the venture.

He had left his job and was figuring out what to do next when Sunita suggested taking the business a little further.

“I left my job, and we were figuring out what was to be done. That’s when my mom said, ‘Let’s make this bigger,’” Rajvardhan recalls.

As part of his research, Rajvardhan travelled across northern and western India to learn more about traditional sweets and understand how they were made. He also travelled to recruit halwais (traditional sweet makers) who could join the K&G kitchen.

The journey gave him a closer look at the traditional sweet-making ecosystem across the country. It also helped him see more clearly what made his mother’s approach different.

“My mom was different from many of them,” he says. “My mom makes with hands, pure ghee, no artificial flavours.”

That became an important part of how the family wanted to shape K&G: keeping traditional recipes at the centre while also experimenting with fusion products for modern palates.

With that approach, the business continued to grow beyond its initial customer base in Guwahati. In 2026, after a year of serving customers in the city and receiving positive feedback, K&G expanded its reach through its website and Amazon. The family is also planning to enter quick commerce.

Today, the menu brings together traditional dishes and fusion items designed for modern tastes.

From raw materials to the final taste check 

For Sunita, however, running a food business comes down to getting every little detail right.  “I am very organised at heart. I plan ahead,” she says.

The moment an order comes in, she sets deadlines for herself, gets the raw materials ready and begins planning the work.

The kitchen team includes halwais from Rajasthan and Haryana. There are eight people on board — four working in operations and marketing and four in the kitchen.

Sunita remains closely involved with what comes out of the kitchen. Before anything is packed, she personally checks the sweets for quality.

“Our motive is to ensure customer satisfaction,” she says.

She credits her team for helping turn that intention into reality. “My team is amazing. They meticulously follow my instructions, which makes the end product worth it.”

She also draws on her own years of experience while the team develops new products. 

At one point, the team was researching a new product. Sunita felt that the product might not turn out well and shared her concerns with the halwais.

After taking her feedback into account, the product improved.

The young halwais began praising her for her expertise — a moment that made Sunita particularly proud.

For someone who had spent much of her life as a homemaker, seeing her knowledge of food being recognised by younger professionals was special.

Taking an earning opportunity to other women 

K&G now has nearly 3,000 customers and receives around four to five orders a day. The business currently earns around Rs 2–2.5 lakh a month, and the family hopes to eventually take that figure to Rs 6–7 lakh.

Its customer base has also begun extending beyond individual orders. K&G works with businesses and brands through a B2B corporate gifting model.

As the business grew, Sunita began thinking about how it could create an earning opportunity for other women too. Having built something of her own later in life, she wanted to make it easier for women to earn without having to step away from their responsibilities at home.

“I always felt women need a platform to be financially independent, and I wanted to give them that platform,” she says.

So far, she has brought two women into the initiative.

The model allows them to work from home. Sunita provides the products, while they focus on selling them and receive a share of their sales. 

The women are trained on how to speak to customers and how to get their first orders. There are no targets or fixed time commitments.

The initiative currently involves women from Shillong and Assam, and they receive 23 percent of the sales they make.

For Sunita, the idea is simple: give women the tools, training and confidence to earn on their own terms.

‘I earn by sitting at home’

One of the women who has joined the initiative is Prem Agarwal from Shillong, Meghalaya.

Prem lives with her husband and son. Her husband is unwell, and she is both the family’s breadwinner and a caregiver.

For Prem, the arrangement allows her to focus on finding customers while K&G handles the rest. “From home I work. I just need to get orders for them, and then they will take care of everything,” she says.

She earns around Rs 6,000–7,000 a month through the initiative, though she says her earnings usually go above Rs 7,000.

Prem also values the support she receives from the K&G team.

They train her about the products so she can speak to customers with confidence and earn their trust.

“They train me like I am a part of the family,” she says. “It helps me in networking.”

For Sunita, that is precisely what she hoped the initiative would create: a way for women to earn while working around their own circumstances. 

The family behind her first step 

The journey of Kitchen and Gupshup has also been a family effort from the beginning.

Sunita says her husband was the first person to encourage her. Her children were delighted when they learnt that their mother was starting a business.

“The environment was so supportive,” she says.

What began with four items made in a home kitchen has since grown into a business with a team, thousands of customers and a growing network of women sellers.

And at the centre of it all is still Sunita — planning every order, checking every sweet before it leaves the kitchen and trusting recipes she has perfected over years.

Years after asking herself, “Why not make this a business?”, Sunita is still in the kitchen, working with the recipes she spent years making for her family, now as the owner of something she can call her own. 

Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: thebetterindia.com