She lost the school competition. Then a stranger’s child told her mother it was the best thing she had ever eaten.
Devanshi Bhatt and her co-founder built a chips company while carrying full-time B.Tech degrees at Parul University. The engineering behind it is more interesting than the story.
Parul Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research Centre, Parul University, Vadodara.
The competition was on 25 December, at school, and Devanshi Bhatt did not win it.
She had made sun-dried chips with a flavour of her own. The judges were unmoved. Then a little girl who had tried them turned to her mother and said it was the best thing she had ever eaten.
That sentence, from someone with no stake in being kind, is the entire origin of Crunchy Wavez.
The gap in the aisle
By the time Devanshi enrolled in B.Tech Food Technology at Parul University, the idea had turned into a question worth researching, and the research produced a straightforward finding about the Indian snack aisle.
Cheap chips are unhealthy. The healthy alternatives, built on beetroot or millet, do not taste good enough for children to choose them. Parents buy the second category. Children eat the first.
Nobody was making chips that taste like the fried version and are genuinely not the fried version. That gap became the product specification.
The stall test
Their Head of Department gave them advice that skipped every step a business plan would have taken. Put up a stall in college. Find out whether anyone buys it.
They ran stalls at HORTUS and at Udyam, the management festival on campus. People bought the chips, and then came back. That was the evidence they needed before committing, and it cost them a table rather than a funding round.
Only after that did they enter the incubation programme at the Parul Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research Centre and build the company properly.
Six months on a shelf, no preservatives
This is the part where the food technology degree stops being a credential and starts being the product.
Food spoils because of two things: water and oil. Water lets microbes grow. Oil goes rancid.
Crunchy Wavez removes both. The potato slices are sun-dried, which takes the water out. Then they are roasted rather than deep-fried, which cuts the oil content by about 45 per cent. With almost no water and very little oil, there is not much left for spoilage to work with.
The result holds for six months without a single chemical preservative, which is not a marketing position. It is a consequence of the process.
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The sun-drying is done by women employed locally for that stage, which puts wages into the same town the product comes from.
A year of testing two variables
The research and development ran for a full year, and the discipline in it is worth noting because most student projects do not have any.
They tested slice thickness and flavour powder particle size separately rather than together, which is the only way to know which change caused which result. Anyone who has run an experiment will recognise the method. Not many undergraduate founders apply it to a snack.
Their stopping rule was equally clear. If 85 per cent of tasters love it, stop worrying about the other 15 per cent. Chasing universal approval is how a product never launches.
The arithmetic of Rs 10 to Rs 20
The pricing decision shows the same kind of thinking, and it is the part most student ventures get wrong.
They set the price between Rs 10 and Rs 20, aimed at students aged 15 to 25, and they can explain both boundaries.
At Rs 5, the price itself signals cheap and therefore unhealthy, which destroys the entire proposition the product is built on. At Rs 60, it is a treat rather than a habit, and nobody buys it daily. Between Rs 10 and Rs 20 the price says quality without putting the product out of reach of the people meant to eat it regularly.
Marketing followed the same constraint-driven logic. College events for initial exposure, social media because it costs nothing, and no paid advertising at all. The money that would have gone to ads went into materials and production instead.
The team split reflects it too. The company grew from two people to sixteen. Parth handles money, supply chain and logistics. Devanshi handles product quality, marketing and public relations. Two founders, two domains, no overlap.
What the year produced
The company was registered on 7 March, which sits one day off International Women’s Day, and the founders chose the date deliberately.
Since then: incubation at the university’s innovation centre, meetings with IAS officers and with the Governor of Bihar, and a place in the finals of the Women Vadodara competition. The product launched at the Vadodara Startup Festival, and the CEO of Gopal Snacks, one of Gujarat’s largest snack manufacturers, inaugurated it.
Both founders are still full-time third-year students. They sleep four to five hours. The business work happens at night, after the academic day is finished. The teaching staff have been supportive of the arrangement, which matters more than it sounds, because the alternative is choosing between the degree and the company at twenty years old.
What is actually transferable here
The temptation with a story like this is to file it under inspiration and move on. The more useful reading is that almost every decision in it was made cheaply.
The market research was a stall at a college festival. The validation was whether strangers came back for a second packet. The product engineering came out of the degree the founder was already enrolled in. The pricing was reasoned from what the number signals rather than from a spreadsheet. The marketing budget was zero by choice, so the money could go into production.
None of that required capital. It required asking people things and then believing the answers.
The incubation centre they went through charges students nothing, takes ideas from any faculty, and runs the same route for everyone: idea submission, a verbal pitch, a formal presentation, fifteen days of pre-incubation spent on market research and talking to real customers, then mentorship and support with government grant applications.
Devanshi’s first customer feedback arrived from a child at a competition she lost. Everything after that was method.
Explore B.Tech Food Technology and other programmes at Parul University, and the incubation route that took this product from a college stall to a launch.
