Summer Internship with Slurrp Farm – Lisa Anchalia from Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi
Lisa Anchalia describes her internship at Slurrp Farm, and talks about the benefits one could receive by interning in a start-up. Lisa is a student at Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi. Read on to explore her internship story.
Summer vacations were approaching and my first year at college was almost coming to an end. Being a lazy person, I never applied for any internship, even though we got a constant (and often unwanted) prompts from our placement cell. On the last day of my second semester exam, I casually asked my friends about their plans for the vacations and somehow their reply made me a little worried. Everybody was going for some corporate internship or a research project at summer school. I realized that it was about time to wake up from slumber and set the wheels in motion.
I always wondered about working with a start-up that would give me a steep learning curve and significant insights on how to run a company. After my initial struggles with resume making, I brimmed the inboxes of my prospect recruiters. Eventually, a couple of start-ups rang my phone. One was Entinova, a venture by IIT Delhi under-graduates, for a ‘Product Innovation’ role while the other was Slurrp Farm for a ‘Sales and Marketing’ internship. Although the former was a great opportunity, I went with the latter because of my inclination towards the job.
Slurrp Farm is a start-up that aims to provide a blend of healthy & tasty food. It was an 18-month old venture, started by an ex-employee of JP Morgan. I was the first intern to join the existing 10 member team. The team comprised of alumni’s from Mckinsey, Bain, Harvard and Cambridge. They had recently launched their first product of organic cookies with three different flavours–Ragi & Chocolate, Oats & Banana, and Cheese Thyme fingers. And all of them were really delicious!
As this was my first internship, I was a little scared in the beginning. On my first day, I was introduced to the whole team and was given an informal orientation about the company and my responsibilities. Including me, there were four people in the sales department. My work was to find alternative vendors for the company to source its raw material, and to promote the brand image through social media. I designed a complete layout of actionable to be executed in the coming month. I constantly maintained an excel sheet of ‘to dos’ and submitted a weekly review of my work.
I made regular visits to different retail stores all over the city to collect information about the existing brands and their product segmentation. I connected with many local manufacturers to understand the pricing of the different organic ingredients. Initially, I faced certain troubles in completely grasping the purpose of this assignment. But with the guidance of my mentors I could really understand the bigger picture. Shauravi (Founder) & Meghana (Sales Head) appreciated my work as I could figure out a number of vendors to source the ingredients at a better price. This should significantly reduce the cost incurred to the company. I also found some vendors who manufacture organic granola crunch and pastas, that will in turn help Slurrp Farm to diversify its product line. As an ad-hoc project, I identified key areas to focus on facebook to channelize the digital marketing activities of the company.
I must admit that I’m taking away a big bag of learning from my stint at Slurrp Farm. Apart from work, I learned how to write professional emails, how to deal with different people and most importantly the challenges involved in running a start-up. On the last day of internship, I got my first cheque and that meant a lot to me. This was my most memorable summer and the good part was that I really enjoyed the work.
If Lisa‘s internship experience motivates you, you can view the latest internship in Delhi.
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