The Good Junk

Bhuman Dani aims to make Indian kitchens healthier with WickedGüd

- BY KATHAKALI CHANDA

Bhuman Dani's home would turn into a battlefield come snack time every day, with his wife and older son, four, crossing swords over what to eat. “Kids end up dictating consumer behaviour and mothers end up domesticating junk food. That’s the problem we wanted to solve,” says Dani, the founder of WickedGüd, makers of healthy noodles and pasta.

Launched in 2021 with the mission statement 'Unjunk India, One Kitchen At A Time', WickedGüd was christened as a portmanteau of the two core ideas—wicked taste and good ingredients. The goal of its first products that rolled out in early 2022 was to eliminate from kitchen staples, like instant noodles and pasta, four elements that pack in lifestyle diseases: Flour, palm oil, sugar and chemicals.

The intersection of health and instant noodles is a space poised for explosive growth. According to a report by Mordor Intelligence, in 2025, the instant noodles market in India stands at $1,590 million, with a CAGR forecast of 13.39 percent. Another report by Data Bridge Market Research pegs the health food market at $35.89 million in 2024, and estimates it to grow to $139.56 million by 2032, at a CAGR of 18.5 percent.

But selling healthy food to Indians is easier said than done. It's a lesson Dani had learnt during his first outing as an entrepreneur as the co-founder of TGL Co (The Good Life Company, a specialty tea and coffee brand). "In India, taste and price are primary, health is secondary," he says. "So, health can drive repeat purchases, but first-time sales are always about taste and price." Dani wanted to mimic the taste of the legacy brand that cornered more than half of the Indian market, but engineer it with, what he calls, better-for-you ingredients.