At 62, how Sunita Agarwal turned her homemade besan barfi into a thriving business
Guwahati: 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, jaggery, and most importantly, ghee and nuts go into each batch.
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.
In 2022, what started as a home kitchen with just four items – besan barfi, gond barfi, masala channa daal and Mathris – became Kitchen and Gupshup (K&G).
Initially, the business focused only on Guwahati. By 2024, the venture had expanded to 30+ SKUs across savoury and sweet and officially started running from a commercial kitchen.
The kitchen team now includes halwais from Rajasthan and Haryana. There are eight people on board – four in operations and marketing and four in the kitchen.
Around this time, Sunita’s son Rajvardhan, who had left his job, joined her in the venture.”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.
In 2026, after a year of serving customers in the city, K&G expanded its reach through its website and Amazon.
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.
As the business grew, Sunita began thinking about how it could create an earning opportunity for other women too. The model allows them to work from home. Sunita provides the products, while they focus on selling them and receive 23 percent of their sales.
One of the women who has joined the initiative is Prem Agarwal from Shillong, Meghalaya, who earns around Rs 6,000-7,000 a month.”From home I work. I just need to get orders for them, and then they will take care of everything,” Prem says.
