India’s chai tapri (tea kiosk) culture at bus stops, railway stations and seemingly every other street corner continued for decades, even as the containers for holding the tea changed from kulhads (mud cups) to glass cups and, more recently, to paper cups.
Since the covid-19 pandemic in particular, people were cautious about the hygiene of hand-washed reusable glass cups. The disposable nature of paper cups makes them seem like a healthier option – but they’re not.
A person who drinks one cup of hot liquid from plastic covered paper cups in 15 minutes ingesting 25,000 microplastics and increasing their risk of cancer, reproductive defects and neurological disorders, according to a 2020 study by the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. Moreover, the plastic in the coating is “not even a little recyclable, reusable, reusable – nothing,” complains Dhaval Nail, who along with his brother Jayesh Nai is promoting the return of glass cups – this time with the stamp of assured hygiene.
As the founders of a new company called Mahantam, the brothers (Dhaval is 22 and Jayesh 24) developed an automatic glass washer for India’s tea stall owners.
Available in two sizes—1ft x1ft and 2ft x 2ft—Mahantam’s Rs35,000 ($420) fully automatic machine washes nine cups at a time in somewhere between twelve and twenty seconds, based on the selected cycle. There is also a semi-automatic alternative available for Rs28,000 ($336).
The brothers, who hail from Dhanera, Gujarat, thought of all sorts of possible cost and energy savings, from using pressurized water to save water to building a machine that runs on just 12 volts. The same battery that tea vendors use for a small light bulb in their stalls can be used for the machine.
From college to Shark Tank India to mass production
Dhaval started prototyping a washer in 2020 as part of a college project, initially borrowing Rs10,000 ($120) from his professor and mentor. A YouTuber friend of his shared the creation online, and the first order came in. After that, Dhaval presented his ideas to more professors and raised 1 lakh rupees ($1,200) to create improved versions.
Many months, prototypes and three orders later, the duo appeared on Shark Tank in November 2022 and an all-shark deal guaranteed of Rs30 lakh (nearly $36,000) for 20% equity.
To date, the entrepreneurs have given machines to 40 tea stall owners across Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru and other Indian cities to use and review.
“We give [away] machines so that we can get proof-of-concept machines that are perfect, and then we can go to mass production,” said Dhaval.
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