Happy Birthday Varun Kapur: Celebrating the journey from banking to building Yu Foods

Varun Kapur, who celebrates his birthday on 15 November, co-founded a food brand that took preservative-free instant meals from a small lab to supermarket shelves and airline menus.

The first lab Varun Kapur and Bharat Bhalla worked out of measured 12 feet by 8 feet. It was 2020, and the two former investment bankers were testing ways to make an instant meal without adding preservatives. Before launching Yu Foods, they spoke to more than 500 consumers about what they bought, what they ate and what put them off packaged food.

Kapur, a chartered accountant, had joined YES BANK in 2004 and risen to senior president. He went on to work as a principal at DOIT Group before co-founding Yu Foodlabs with Bhalla.

Yu went on sale in October 2021 with pasta and oat bowls that needed only hot water. The company used freeze-drying to give the meals a shelf life of up to a year without refrigeration. When Yu added gajar and moong dal halwa later that year, Kapur called the desserts his favourites. Within the company’s first 10 months of operations, its three-cheese pasta and gajar halwa were being served on SpiceJet flights.

In 2023, cricketer Hardik Pandya came on board as an investor and fronted Yu’s first brand campaign. The following year, the company raised ₹55 crore in a Series B round led by investor Ashish Kacholia and members of the Asian Paints promoter group. By then, Yu had moved beyond meal bowls into products such as whole-wheat noodles, coconut water and fruit juices.

By FY26, stronger sales of whole-wheat noodles, Korean ramen and beverages helped lift Yu’s operating revenue to ₹75 crore, up from ₹35 crore the previous year, Bhalla told Inc42. Quick commerce, which gives shoppers some of the same convenience Kapur and Bhalla set out to offer with their first meal bowls, now accounts for most of Yu’s revenue.