India's First Plug and Play Chimney Built By Beyond Appliances | Eshwar K Vikas

He automated 35,000 restaurants. Then he visited 300 homes and started again.

Eshwar built Mukunda Foods, a commercial kitchen automation company that now runs inside most of the restaurants you order from. Beyond Appliances is what happens when you turn that same technology toward the Indian home kitchen.

Every home kitchen in India has the same three problems. Milk boils over. Gas stays on too long. The chimney is either absent or inadequate. Eshwar noticed all three while visiting over 250 to 300 homes across 1BHK, 3BHK and tier two cities, and decided those were the problems worth solving. Not because they were glamorous, but because everyone has them every single day.

Beyond Appliances is 18 months old. Eshwar spoke to Ragini about why he deliberately ignored the US market to stay in India, what happens when a product feature backfires, and why he thinks the entire Indian kitchen appliance industry has effectively no real competition.

What is the real opportunity in the Indian home kitchen?

Eshwar describes walking into a customer home that had a 10,000 rupee monthly electricity bill and asking why there was no chimney. The answer was not cost and not awareness. Almost everyone knew what a chimney was. The problem was the landlord. Most landlords will not allow tenants to cut the eight-inch hole in the wall that a standard chimney requires. That single structural barrier is suppressing an entire category.

Beyond Appliances is building chimneys that do not require wall cutting, which removes the landlord veto and opens the category to every rented home in India, which is a very large number.

Why did Eshwar choose India over the US?

He is specific about the difference. A Singaporean, Chinese or European household cooks occasionally, maybe on weekends. An Indian household cooks twice a day, every day, with high heat, oil, spices and steam. The kitchen takes more damage and the automation opportunity is more valuable. No global appliance brand has ever built specifically for that use case.

His view: Beyond is the only appliance company born in India, designed and manufactured for the Indian use case. 85 to 90% of components are made in India. The rest, he says, simply cannot yet be sourced domestically.

What does Beyond Appliances actually make?

The product insight that shaped the range came from one universal observation: milk overboiling. Everyone who cooks in an Indian kitchen has walked away for two minutes and come back to a mess. There is no appliance on the market today that can detect when your milk is about to boil and turn off the gas automatically. Beyond is building that.

The pressure cooker feature is further along. A sensor listens for the number of whistles and automatically turns off the burner after the count is reached. At the time of recording this had been in development for six to seven months and had not yet been publicly announced.

What is the android chimney and what does it do?

Eshwar describes the intuition behind it: while you are cooking, you realise the eggs are missing. Instead of stopping to write it down or open a different app, you just add it from the chimney interface. The feature integrates with shopping so the list can translate directly to an order. He was not certain this would work when they built it. The customer response proved it would.

The android chimney was also a commercial risk. A screen in a chimney was something no Indian customer had seen before. They floated it through the Beyond Insider program, asking whether people would want it. Eighty percent said yes.

What has not worked and what did Beyond learn from it?

One attempt involved quick commerce. The category is difficult for a product like a chimney because the installation component means a purchase is not complete at delivery. Getting the product there fast is solvable. Getting a trained installer there fast is a different problem. Beyond is working with dark stores for spare parts, which may be the more practical quick commerce use case for an appliance brand.

On the copycat question, he is direct: it happens. When a competitor copies a feature, the only real defence is R&D that stays ahead. He is building a mode through product depth and user experience rather than trying to protect any individual feature.

How does Beyond think about selling without discounting?

He describes the tension clearly: marketplaces do not force discounts, but if every other brand is discounting and you are not, you disappear from visibility. His answer is to launch new products during festive periods rather than discount existing ones. A new collection at full price during a high-traffic window captures demand without eroding the brand. He launched a designer range through a brand ambassador two months before the festive season, available only in select channels.

On organic growth he is honest: for a new brand, organic reach requires either being an influencer yourself or spending money to be visible. Zero-spend organic is not a realistic strategy at this stage. What he is building toward is strong enough product reviews and word of mouth that the organic component grows without being manufactured.

What do first-time and second-time founding look like differently?

He describes the biggest shift as understanding that a consumer does not behave like a restaurant operator. A restaurant operator evaluates a machine on uptime, output and cost per unit. A consumer evaluates the same machine on how it feels, how it looks and how confidently it fits into their home. Those are different conversations and they require different language, different distribution and different content.

His north star metric is not GMV. He tracks sell-through, because a high sell-through rate tells him the product is genuinely wanted rather than just purchased and stored. In a category with low penetration and low consumer education, demand is real only when people are actually using the thing they bought.

Listen to the full conversation with Eshwar on Fynd Out with Ragini.