Health and fitness have very recently become a fad in India. With the rising aspirations of the population the healthcare market has also witnessed tremendous growth and high market fragmentation. With people looking at supplements and vitamins in new light, companies largely based in the supplement industry are trying to make a name for them. Celebrity actor Randeep Hooda, famous for movies like Murder 3, Highway is himself a fitness enthusiast and has faced his own share of difficulties finding a company with reliable safe, natural supplements for use. “I grew up in Rohtak and when I started gymming, we heard supplements are a really big help in growing muscles, and we used to get this green powder I still remember. It was called ‘Protein’ and you had to mix it in milk and the problem was it didn’t mix. It just settled on top unless you kept stirring,” the actor tells you.
This started about four decades back when Dr Randhir Hastir, founder of body building in India and who trained Prem Chandra and The Great Khali, found out that the main problem faced by body builders in India was fake or imported substituent’s that gave nothing but health problems in the name of quick results.
Even today the market faces these risks but the consumers have become more intelligent and awe of what they need to take.
Hastir dreamt of a fit and healthy India when he started a dot-com business selling genuine organic supplements. He also started an interactive website so that people could talk to professionals about their problems and get better recommendations in the hope that, over the years, we may have a healthy and fit India.
“Body building is not just about being muscular. It is about science and nutrition and about taking the right supplements in the amount required by your body,” Dr Ankush Sabharwal, CEO of Body Building India (BBI), the largest fitness and supplements company in India, tells you.
The use and need of supplements is not limited to men hoping to get six packs by gyming all day. Slowly, woman of all age groups and lifestyles are realising the importance of keeping fit the healthy way.
This is where Ros Nutrition steps in — a company co-owned by actor Randeep Hooda. The good news is that it will also offer a woman-only range of supplements to cater to female fitness and body building enthusiasts.
“This new line of supplements is our own product which will be available pan-India through our BBI retail stores and websites. The fitness sector in India is growing at a rapid rate of over 18 per cent and is expected to touch Rs 7,000 crore by end-2017,” Sabharwal tells you.
With this aim, BBI launched Gym 99 with the unique concept of pay and play for the first time in India. It will provide customers an option to pay just Rs 99 to use best-in-class gym facilities across India. The machines and equipment are imported from Europe and the US. The gym aims to attract housewives, college students and businessmen with flexible schedules. The aim is to expand aggressively and open 50 gyms across India by the end of 2017 with an investment of Rs 25-35 crore.
“Our first gym will come up in Delhi and we are looking to expand to cities like Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Pune, Noida and Gurgaon,” Hooda said, adding that at such an economical price, this fitness idea was meant to revolutionise the fitness industry as we know it in India.