At a Ganpati gathering in Mumbai, lunch was over and everyone was waiting for dessert. The thalis had been cleared, conversations had moved on, and there was only one thing left to do: bring out the kheer.

Except this time, there was something unusual in the cutlery.

Niki Rai, who had organised the gathering, asked her guests to hold on to their spoons instead of throwing them away. A few eyebrows went up. She had already told everyone that these were edible, but people were still understandably unsure.

Then came dessert. “Now this is your biscuit,” Rai told the children, handing them their dessert with the spoon.

The reaction was almost immediate. The children started biting into the spoons, treating them less like cutlery and more like a crunchy snack. The adults were more hesitant, watching first to see if it really worked. Soon, however, others wanted a taste too.

“It was quite a spectacle, but it was worth it,” Rai recalls.

The spoons had been made by Mumbai-based startup Edybites, which is trying to tackle a very ordinary problem: what happens to a disposable spoon after the few minutes it spends helping us finish a meal?

Its answer is simple enough to eat. Founded by Rupesh K Sanghvi in 2022, Edybites makes edible spoons using a millet and flour-based formulation. The idea is that the spoon can become part of the meal rather than another piece of waste to be thrown away. If it is not eaten, the product is designed to naturally decompose.

But turning that simple idea into a spoon that could hold its own through a meal was another story. It had to be sturdy enough to carry food, pleasant enough to eat and practical enough to make at a price people would accept. 

The idea began with a spoon and a piece of khakra

For Sanghvi, the thought first came during the COVID-19 lockdown.

With fewer services and errands available, everyday household work suddenly meant doing much more oneself. One day, after preparing a meal and looking at a sink full of utensils, he found himself eating with his fingers because there was no clean spoon left.

That brought back a familiar Gujarati food memory: khakra.

“If we can finish our last meal of dal khichdi with a combination of khakra,” he thought, could something similar be made in the form of a spoon?

The thought stayed with him. It also connected with something Sanghvi had observed during his more than 17 years in the aviation and travel industry. Having worked in sales and business development with airlines including Malaysia Airlines, Flydubai, Malindo Air and Kuwait Airways, he had seen how much disposable material moved through a flight.

Once a flight landed, used food packaging and cutlery had to be discarded. Some meal components could not be reused because of safety and airline policies, even when they had not been consumed.

For Sanghvi, that raised a broader question: could at least one small part of the meal be made differently?

He initially imagined the spoon being used with yoghurt,........

© The Better India