Nommli provides delicious cultural experiences

FOR-M graduate Nommli was one of the six companies that received a $10,000 grant at the recent Founder Showcase. The Madison-based company has developed a food technology platform designed to sell authentic food from various cultures to a national audience. The food kits step beyond everyday favorites, like Mexican and Italian fare, and provide cuisines that are unfamiliar to many Americans, such as Himalayan and Indonesian options.

Co-founders Padmini Chintakayala and Raj Peddapati are originally from India. The couple became passionate about the connection between culture and food through their children.

“I found myself very often balancing the world of food and culture between the world I live in here and what I want to pass down to my kids,” Chintakayala said.

She noticed her 8-year-old son’s interest in the types of food his friends ate in their homes.

“He was so curious, and he wanted me to be part of it. They (children) thrive so much when the parents are involved in the activities they do. I saw the market and I noticed HelloFresh and all these other folks (online food subscriptions); their current business is really focused on adults or on kids. There’s not something that would give a full cultural experience to the entire family. That’s what I’m looking to build,” she said.

Launched in 2023, the company provides family-style meal kits that are accompanied by what Chintakayala calls an “immersive cultural experience.”

“We are here to help people get comfortable with different cultures of the world in a way that’s engaging for the entire family, and we want to do this as inclusively as possible,” she said.

“We send out cultural recommendations for things like movies, books or music and history. And for kids, we send out some adventure books or facts. All those learning components, so that the entire family can have that cultural experience around the food,” she explained.

Both Chintakayala and Peddapati have extensive technical backgrounds and they see endless opportunities to commercialize the data generated by Nommli sales.

“I foresee us building an AI powered engine that is going to be heavily data-centric on flavor profile and culture profile of people,” she said. “Imagine you have customer data about what books they like, what music they like, what cultures they love. That’s an amazingly powerful AI tool that could be a SaaS platform by itself down the lane, and that’s something I’m very, very excited about. That’s to come, but that is something that we’re looking to build as we grow.”

“Once we understand how much someone likes a certain culture using the AI, we’ll be able to give them travel recommendations, museum recommendations- even inside the US, there are pockets of these deep ethnic experiences,” she continued.

Nommli is largely bootstrapped, with the exception of a $5,000 grant from accelerator MadWorks and the $10,000 grant from FOR-M. The company is currently in the midst of a funding round and met with several investors at the Wisconsin Technology Council’s recent Early Stage Symposium.

The company anticipates that 2024 will be a year of tremendous growth. Nommli plans to expand its cuisine offerings and add more cultural content to its meal kits.

To learn more about this emerging company, and view its current food delivery options, connect with Nommli here.