Bakey's or ‘Bakeys’ was founded in 2010 by Narayan Peesapaty as an environmentally friendly alternative to plastic, wood and bamboo utensils.
Bakeys was not only driven to take the world by storm with it's edible cutlery but also wanted to reduce water usage and encourage millet production in the country.
Peesapaty took the world by storm by raising crowdfunding of more than $155,000 on various platforms including Kickstarter.
Disposable cutlery now had a competitor; edible cutlery.
As the company promoted “eat with it, and then eat it”, it stirred an international trend of adopting eco-friendly alternatives to non-biodegradable plastic.
The second reason as to why Peesapaty wanted to induce this phenomena around the world was to educate people on how the production of rice has curbed the production of a much healthier alternative, millet, which is used to make these spoons.
Production of 1 kg of rice requires almost 5000 litres of water. As a result of the increasing rice consumption, water used for agriculture purposes has also increased considerably.
With a surplus of a million tons of rice produced as buffer stock, most of it remains unused and thus perishes.
In the last 4 years 125 million ton of surplus rice was procured which has already started rotting.
If even 1 million ton of rice rots, 5 trillion litres of water goes to waste which could have satisfied the needs of millions of people for almost 20 years.
The electricity used could have been enough to power cities like Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad etc for three whole years.
In comparison, rice production requires 6000% more water than millet production.
Facts aside, Peesapaty's idea was truly innovative and an exquisite example of entrepreneurship for a cause in India.
Millets were cheaper and far more healthier to consume which resulted in the making of beautiful cutlery sans plastic.
Behold the wonder of edible spoons, forks and chopsticks!
And another photo just because they look so good!
Bakeys was a phenomena and like it's edible spoons that were biodegradable, it's name soon began degrading as well.
Logistic and shipping posed threats to the business and the company failed to provide thousands of people, who backed them, with the cutlery they promised to deliver.
It has been three years and it seems that Peesapaty has not been able to provide any explanation as well.
In January 2019, Narayana Peesapaty was arrested for allegedly cheating the Bank of Maharashtra of ₹2.5 crore.
Bakeys was indeed an inspiration but it didn't end well for Peesapaty.
What's ironic is that hundreds of websites featured him for his idea but a simple Google search would prove that they aren't as supportive now, they don't even mention his name after the discovery of his fraudulent activities.
Well, one thing I can tell you is that Peesapaty's ideas were visionary, while his actions, not so much.
Task of the day: Do one thing today that is out of your comfort zone, get criticised for it and then don't do it for the rest of your life. Sounds good?
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