Protein Pantry, a Delhi-based clean-label frozen food brand, has raised Rs 9 crore — roughly $1 million — in a seed round led by Sharrp Ventures, the family office backing consumer brands out of Mumbai. The round closed less than a year after the company started selling.

Who else is in the round

Peercheque, Consumer Collective by Atrium and Indian Silicon Valley Capital joined the round, alongside an angel list heavy on consumer-brand operators: Mamaearth co-founder Varun Alagh, Rishubh Satiya, Avnish Anand, Arush Chopra, Saurabh Munjal and Signal Ventures, among others.

That investor mix says something about the company's positioning. Protein Pantry is not being sold as a food-science play. It is being sold as a brand bet — the kind that lives or dies on repeat purchase rates and shelf placement.

The product

Founded in November 2025 by Disha Bhattacharya and Prashanth Bhushan, the company makes ready-to-cook, high-protein frozen items for Indian households: soya chaap, kebabs, cutlets, and falafels. The pitch is what they leave out. No refined flour, no preservatives, no palm oil. Everything is baked rather than fried, and the ingredient lists are meant to read like a home kitchen shelf.

It is a narrow lane with real demand behind it. Protein consciousness has moved from gym culture into mainstream Indian grocery baskets over the past few years, and the frozen aisle has been slow to respond with anything that isn't battered and deep-fried.

Where it sells

The brand says it now serves more than 30,000 households, with what it describes as a strong repeat rate. It sells direct-to-consumer and through quick-commerce platforms including Blinkit, FirstClub and Flipkart Minutes, across Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Jaipur.

Quick commerce is the interesting part of that distribution story. For a frozen brand, ten-minute delivery solves the problem that has historically capped the category in India— last-mile cold-chain reliability and the household freezer space needed to justify a bulk trip to a supermarket. Selling through dark stores lets a young brand skip both.

What the money is for

The capital primarily goes toward setting up and scaling a manufacturing unit, with continued spend on R&D and the supply chain. That is the standard next move for a frozen brand that has proven demand on someone else's production line: margins in the category are made or lost in the plant, and co-manufacturing caps both quality control and unit economics.

Owning production also matters for the clean-label claim. Preservative-free frozen food is harder to make consistently than the conventional version, and the failure mode — inconsistent texture, short shelf life, spoilage in transit — is the kind that kills repeat purchase quickly.

The read

A $1 million seed is little money, and Protein Pantry is competing in a category where established players have plant capacity, distribution muscle, and pricing room it does not have yet. It has a clearer product story than most of the frozen aisle and a distribution channel that didn't exist when the incumbents were built. The next twelve months, and whether the manufacturing line comes online on schedule, will show whether that is enough.

Source

Entrackr — "Protein Pantry raises Rs 9 Cr in seed round led by Sharrp Ventures"

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