Inspired by her positive first-hand experience with plant-based nutrition, Holistic Health Coach Manasa Rajan launched her very own healthy raw snack with Cure Bars. After finding success in retail, the founder then moved on to the cure.fit platform, to be able to reach a wider audience and help make a real impact on their health. She shares advice and recommendations for aspirants who wish to enter this competitive space and invest in personal branding that’s authentic, respected, and credible.
I did my MBA in Marketing and started my career in Corporate Communications at a stockbroking firm. A few years later, once I had my daughter, I became interested to learn more about improving my own health, which led me to study nutrition and also begin a process of research and extensive reading about food and how it relates to health & fitness. I then went on to study plant-based nutrition and began working with people on their health journey, as a Holistic Health Coach.
In the beginning, at the time of my own health transformation through clean eating and a plant foods lifestyle, the change that my friends and family saw was so striking, that many of them requested me to help them make a similar switch. While working with many friends and family and seeing their remarkable transformation to beat joint pain, diabetes, PCOS, skin issues, and migraines, I found my calling.
I had been working as a health coach for 6-7 years, at the time, and I could see that with so many of my coaching clients, there was a need for clean-labelled packaged snacks that are truly healthy for you. There were very few brands and such products at the time. And that’s how I came up with the idea to create a snack that is raw, packed with nutrient-dense superfoods, and truly healthy and convenient to carry. It also helped me channel my passion for food, and fulfilled my love for creating and experimenting with new recipes.
Based on the quality of the product, it took me 1.5 months to establish the product, and then I was also funded. With funding, I got visibility and brands like Nature’s Basket, and HyperCity slotted my product. Then GST was introduced and complete chaos ensued, and I realised, we needed more accountants than salesforce. That’s when I realised, I can do more by working through a platform than by going at it alone.
It was with the intention to create a substantial impact on the overall health ecosystem, where I could create change towards the availability of clean foods without chemicals on a large scale. I wanted to be instrumental in the change towards the expectation of people, in their own health through a larger nutrition coaching platform, as well as through the digital content platform.