An entrepreneur who pitched his brand on the latest season of the reality show Shark Tank India complained about being treated unfairly by the judges and the channel. In an interview, Fit & Flex’s Pathik Patel said that Anupam Mittal and Deepinder Goyal lacked the knowledge to make some of the comments that they did against him on the show. He also accused the channel of editing out key portions of the interaction, and ignoring the data that he later supplied to them to back his claims.
Appearing on Raj Shamani’s podcast, he said that he wanted to build awareness for the brand, and that funding was the last on his list of reasons to do the show. He said that the pitch was going fine until Anupam and Deepinder got up from their chairs to privately discuss something. They proceeded to raise questions about a certain ingredient in one of his products, and accused him of misrepresenting his brand as being ‘healthy’. “I respected them. I respected their position. They are my elders. But that doesn’t give them the freedom to say whatever they want. It was very unreasonable. It was very unfair. I’d built this business over five years, and for somebody to dismiss it without the proper knowledge, it hurts. I was demotivated,” he said.
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Narrating his experience on the show, Pathik said, “I was prepared for the worst when I saw them talking to each other. And then the first question came my way: ‘Why have you written that you haven’t used any artificial sweetener when it is mentioned that you’ve used oligofructose in the ingredients?'” Pathik said that the ingredient cannot be classified as an artificial sweetener, and that Anupam was misinformed when he claimed that it causes a spike in sugar readings in the body. “Unfortunately, Anupam didn’t know what oligofructose is, and he was wrong about the sugar spike. Oligofructose has a GI index of 0, while sugar has a GI index of 68,” he said, offering to back his claims with hard data.
“He wasn’t ready to listen. I tried to explain the difference to him twice, but he didn’t budge. He kept calling it sugar, but unfortunately, this is completely wrong… If you don’t know what you’re talking about, you should’ve accepted what I said. And if you know what you’re saying, then you should’ve argued,” he said, pointing out that representatives of another brand that used the same ingredient weren’t questioned like he was.
Next, he addressed Deepinder’s complaints. He said that Deepinder found fault with his tagline, “Eat healthy, live well.” Pathik said that he was never claiming that his products are healthy in the first place. When the host pointed out that this is what his tagline implies, he said that his products are healthier in comparison to competitors’ products.
He said that during the pitch, Anupam also described oats as ‘unhealthy’, leading to a rebuttal from Namita Thapar. He said that this portion of the conversation was edited out. Asked if he witnessed any change in sales following his Shark Tank appearance, he said that there was an “11x spike in sales on the next day, and 8x through the next week.” But he said that he was greatly affected by the accusations made against him, and had sleepless nights because of Anupam’s parting words: “Don’t lie about health.” Pathik had previously sent a legal notice to the channel, claiming that he suffered major losses following his appearance on the show.
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