How 'Thekua' turned a former Bihar teacher into the founder of a ₹ 15 crore brand

What began as an attempt to stay occupied after moving to a new city has grown into a ₹15 crore company for former Bihar teacher Veena Devi. After teaching children for 15 years, she moved to Bengaluru with her son, Sameer, where adjusting to a new place and dealing with free time was not easy for her.

Used to staying busy with work, Veena Devi did not like sitting idle at home. After seeing several women in her housing society successfully selling home-cooked food, she decided to start a small venture of her own. That effort gradually grew into Momsmade, a homegrown food business centred on traditional snacks from Bihar, which now fulfils more than 1,000 orders a day and has around 50 women associated with it for making and packaging the products.

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She started from her kitchen with traditional Bihar snacks such as namkeen thekua, meetha thekua and dalbhoote. On her son’s suggestion, she also began making gur thekua, a traditional dish prepared during Chhath Puja. The flavour quickly found acceptance in the housing society, and demand began to rise. In the beginning, she received between 10 and 50 orders a day, but the number later crossed 100.

Today, apart from thekua, Momsmade also makes traditional items such as nimki and chana dal. The story of the business was shared on social media by technology investor Aditya Singh, who said his firm had invested about ₹ 1.5 crore in the start-up and that the company grew 15 times in less than a year. In his post, he wrote that thekua has been a favourite snack in Bihar for generations and is now reaching homes across India in handmade batches.

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As demand for Momsmade increased, Veena Devi’s biggest challenge was maintaining the same taste and quality every time. In the early days, she made thekua in small quantities and relied on experience to judge the right balance of flour, jaggery and ghee. When production rose into the thousands, she turned that experience into a fixed process so that each thekua retained the same taste, crunch and golden colour.

The roots of the recipe lie in the traditional lessons she received from her mother. Those long-followed home methods and flavours became the foundation of the business. Today, every batch is checked carefully before it reaches customers so that thekua’s distinct taste and crunch remain intact. What started in a small home kitchen has now grown into a recognised brand built around traditional Bihar snacks.