A wonderful initiative

Quite like most of us, entrepreneur Simran Oberoi Multani has been clued-up on social media for a really long time. The 38-year-old’s tryst with healthy baking and driving a Facebook community of mindful snack-eaters dates back to the year 2014. While the inspiration to start ‘Ovenderful’, her solo venture, arose out of a quest for delicious yet healthy snacking options for her little son, it didn’t take long for Simran to find her purpose through the same: sensitising school children on the importance of healthy baking and building the healthy baking community further, with a more consistent approach of aligning bakers to specific government schools for healthy bakes distribution.

This enterprising individual and TEDX speaker’17 also made headlines when she received global recognition directly from Facebook twice in 2017 –  by the Global COO of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg in April last year. In a candid chat, she tells us more...

“‘Ovenderful’ started with doing bake sales for raising funds for animal welfare NGOs. I used to do it alone for a long time. Once I started the baking community, I tried to see if I can get more folks to join in,” begins Simran, who in November 2017, was invited as one of the eight selected groups from all over Asia, to showcase community building and unique efforts, to meet Sheryl Sandberg and some of the global FB team in Singapore. Speaking of the same, she enthuses, “Facebook contacted female leaders from across Asia to share their views and ideas on lifting communities in remarkable ways. Our brand has been recognised as one of the most unique and high impact programmes by Sheryl Sandberg. It was insightful to be a part of a forum that offered scope for networking with the new age change makers.”

Armed with an MBA, Simran did a short stint with consulting firms followed by few freelancing gigs. But, her heart lay in community building and social driven initiatives. “We were a part of Bake a Sunshine Cake initiative ( 2015, 2016, 2017) that was carried out across many cities in India as well as in the US where bakers carry homebaked goodies to old age homes and orphanages in the month of December,”she elucidates.

Simrin was also part of the recently concluded run-up event  to spread awareness of the Organics Millets International Trade Fair 2018. “So, the Govt of Karnataka’s social media promotion person, Caroline Radhakrishnan, approached me to be able to use my FB based 20,000 member based platform on healthy baking for a crucial online recipe contest. We had close to 130 recipes and 40 bakers from my community participating and received a great deal of recognition. In fact one of the OMBC bakers has also won the Millet Cooking Contest as well at the Fair too.”