Joseph has done it all: from MNCs to authorship to entrepreneurship

Three years later, after a lot of setbacks in marketing, Joseph’s product won the National Start-up Award in the food processing category in October 2020, as a local patented and clinically proven invention to control blood sugar. Traditionally, he points out, as much as 80 per cent of the fruit grown in Kerala – worth over Rs2,000 crore – ended up as waste every year, because of its size, which made it difficult to package and transport.

His star customer is 51-year-old Chennai businessman Vinu Nair, who suddenly found in 2018 that he had high sugar: as high as 450-500 mg/dl, with the HbA1c level at 7.7 per cent, despite his daily routine of running and exercising. “I heard about jackfruit365 from a running friend and decided to try it because the natural way fascinated me,” he says. “I am not a great one for carbohydrates, but I do have a sweet tooth – and a natural product did not demand any change in diet or lifestyle.”

After taking it for two months, however, Nair was alarmed by the result: his Hb1Ac count dropped drastically, to 6.4 per cent, and he started feeling dizzy. When he got tested for a Rs50-lakh term insurance policy, it had dropped to 5.2. His wife, a medical doctor, advised him to cut his regular diabetes medicine by half. He called Joseph, who gave him the same advice; he has since stopped taking the medicine, and his level is a steady 5.4 which makes him a non-diabetic.

“But we shouldn’t compare this with medicine,” warns Joseph, whose manufacturing plant at Kothamangalam near Kochi has a capacity of five tonnes per day of flour. “Utilisation is not 100 per cent,” he says. “But we have shown the role of jackfruit flour in practising medical nutrition therapy (MNT) guidelines recommended by ADA before starting medicine. With the new trend after the study results, we should be expanding capacity within two years.”