Building India’s Active Nutrition Category | Kapil Thirani x Fast&Up | One in a Billion | Ep 22

How does an Indian sports nutrition brand end up in the Indian cricket team's dressing room without ever pitching for it? This is the Fast&Up story.

In this episode of One in a Billion, Kapil Thirani sits down with Vijayaraghavan Venugopal (Vijay), co-founder of Fast&Up, to discuss building India's sports nutrition category from a gap almost no one was serving in 2015:the space between medical electrolytes and bodybuilder whey protein.

Vijay breaks down the journey:

→ Spotting the market gap as a marathoner and betting on effervescent tablet technology that was new to India

→ Launching Reload as a low-sugar, contrarian electrolyte when sugar was the norm

→ How the brand reached the Indian cricket team organically:spotted on a dressing-room table on live TV

→ Becoming one of the first electrolyte brands in India to get anti-doping certified

→ Riding the Vitamin C wave through COVID by preparing supply early

→ Taking an Indian nutrition brand global:Reload now sells across 30–40 countries

Chapters:

0:00 Coming Up

1:35 Welcome to One in a Billion

2:23 Vijay's Story: A Late Entrepreneur at 40

3:44 The Market Gap: The Missing Middle in Nutrition

6:44 Discovering Effervescent Technology

10:15 Building the First Product: Reload

15:14 The First Launch & the Running Community

20:54 Choosing Which Products & Cities to Focus On

25:20 How Fast&Up Reached the Indian Cricket Team

30:43 Getting Anti-Doping Certified

34:36 How COVID & Vitamin C Changed the Business

39:29 Surviving the Post-COVID Nutrition Boom

46:13 Going Global: Reload in 30+ Countries

55:00 The Future of Sports Nutrition in India

59:40 The Role of Marketplaces

A conversation about category creation, product experience, and building a global nutrition brand out of India.

▶ Start selling on Flipkart: seller.flipkart.com

▶ Subscribe for a new episode of One in a Billion.

#OneInABillion #FastAndUp #SportsNutrition