Org Chart: For batter or worse—iD Fresh's Musthafa is learning to get out of the way

For the better part of two decades, if you wanted anything done at iD Fresh, you went to PC Musthafa. He signed the cheques, chased the collections, sat in on the hiring, vetted every product call, and decided which city the company would enter next. iD Fresh and its founder were, for all practical purposes, the same thing: a company built on one man’s instinct, energy, and an almost unreasonable stubbornness about how dosa batter ought to be made and sold.

It started, as these stories often do in India, with family. Musthafa and his cousins were selling batter out of a 50-square-foot kitchen in Bengaluru roughly 20 years ago. That kitchen has since become a network of factories across Bengaluru, Chennai, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Mangaluru, and Dubai, pushing out 100,000 kg of batter and 300,000 parotas every single day. iD Fresh now reaches over 100 cities in India and ships to consumers in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, the UK, and the US. Musthafa runs the whole operation from Dubai as global CEO.

But when he looks back at what he was actually doing with his days during iD Fresh’s busiest stretch of growth, his own assessment is rather unkind to himself.