Delhi-based entrepreneur Suman Mishra has built HungeRex into a growing food and beverage brand while balancing family responsibilities and handling challenges such as food wastage, staffing, and vendor management. F&B brand HungeRex was founded in Noida in December 2022, the business is now preparing to expand its operations to Hyderabad.
Building a business is rarely a straightforward journey. For women entrepreneurs, the challenge can become even more demanding when business ambitions must be balanced with family responsibilities, childcare and household commitments. Yet, for some, these responsibilities do not put an end to their dreams. Instead, they become the reason to pursue them.
HungeRex founder Suman Mishra is one such example. While managing responsibilities within a joint family and raising three children, she continued to look for an opportunity to build something of her own. Her entrepreneurial journey has included a school job, an attempt to run a playschool and the challenges of starting a food business from scratch.
Today, she is building HungeRex, a food and beverage (F&B) brand that began operations at Spectrum Mall in Sector 75, Noida, on December 14, 2022. After navigating the initial challenges of running a food business, Suman is now preparing to take the brand beyond Noida, with Hyderabad emerging as its next destination.
Her story is not simply about starting a restaurant business. It is about learning to build a brand while managing responsibilities that do not disappear when the working day begins.
Family, Responsibilities and Work
Suman journey into entrepreneurship started long before HungeRex was founded. She got married at a young age and completed her graduation after marriage. As part of a traditional joint family, many decisions were taken collectively, with the views and needs of family members playing an important role in the process. Despite these responsibilities, she wanted to develop her own professional identity.
With support from her family, Suman eventually secured a job at a school, where she handled backend administrative work. She spent around five years in the role, learning how an organisation functions, how administrative responsibilities are managed and how different activities come together to keep a workplace running. That experience later became useful when she started managing her own business.
However, she still had one major challenge. Her children were young, and she could not easily leave them for long hours to pursue a conventional career.
Instead of giving up on the idea of working, she started looking for a business that matched her situation. She wanted something that would allow her to manage family responsibilities while also creating a career of her own.
Business Before HungeRex
In 2016, Suman became a mother to twins. The experience brought new responsibilities but also strengthened her desire to do something professionally.
By 2018, she had taken her first entrepreneurial step by starting a playschool. The business offered her an opportunity to work while remaining connected to an environment relevant to young children. But the venture faced an unexpected setback when the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted normal life.
With children no longer attending the playschool as before, the business could not continue and eventually had to close. For an aspiring entrepreneur, shutting down a business can be a difficult experience. It can bring financial uncertainty, disappointment and questions about what to do next.
For Suman, however, it was not the end of her entrepreneurial ambitions. The experience gave her an early understanding of how external circumstances can affect a business, regardless of the effort invested in it.
Noida Opens New Opportunity
After moving from Delhi to Noida, Suman began exploring the possibility of starting another business. She looked at different locations and considered what kind of venture could work in the city. Her search eventually brought her to Spectrum Mall in Sector 75, Noida.
She liked the location and decided to establish her next venture there. This time, the business would be in the food and beverage sector.
On December 14, 2022, HungeRex began operations, marking Suman's entry into the F&B industry. But starting a food business brought a different set of challenges from those she had encountered while running a playschool.
Food businesses require daily operational discipline. Ingredients must be sourced on time, staff must be available, food preparation must be managed carefully and customer demand must be matched with inventory.
For Suman, learning these aspects while continuing to manage family responsibilities became a defining part of the early journey.
Three Major Challenges
When asked about the difficulties she faced during the initial phase, Suman explained that the challenges were both professional and personal.
As a woman entrepreneur, Suman had to balance running the business with raising her children. While her husband supported her journey, he also had professional career in the medical sector and held a senior position at a large company.
As a result, much of the day-to-day management of the business depended on Suman. From handling operations to making key decisions, she took direct responsibility for ensuring the venture continued to grow while managing her family responsibilities.
Beyond these personal responsibilities, HungeRex faced three operational problems:
• Staffing: Finding suitable employees and ensuring that daily operations ran smoothly was among the initial difficulties.
• Reliable Vendors: A food business depends on suppliers who can provide ingredients and other essentials at competitive prices and maintain consistent quality. In the early days, Suman found it difficult to identify the right vendors and negotiate suitable rates.
• Food Wastage: Managing food inventory is particularly important in the F&B sector because ingredients and prepared items can lose value if demand is incorrectly estimated.
Suman also observed that some suppliers did not initially offer competitive rates, possibly because HungeRex was a new business. Together, these problems placed pressure on the business and made the initial years a period of continuous learning.
Early Challenges & Lessons
Looking back at the business journey, Suman says the first year was filled with several difficulties, but those experiences helped her understand how to manage operations more effectively.
Over time, the business developed a more stable team. She believes that looking after employees and creating a supportive working environment has helped the business retain staff for longer periods. That continuity matters in a food business, where employees become familiar with preparation methods, service expectations and daily routines.
Vendor situation also improved as HungeRex developed more supplier relationships. Having multiple options gave the business greater flexibility when comparing prices and sourcing requirements.
Food wastage, another early problem, has also been brought under control, according to Suman. These changes may appear routine, but they can have a significant effect on a food business's ability to operate sustainably. Reducing waste protects margins. Competitive purchasing helps control costs. A stable team can improve operational consistency.
For a growing F&B brand, progress often comes from improving these everyday processes rather than making one dramatic change.
Four Years of Growth
Suman says HungeRex has recorded positive year-on-year growth over the past four years. That progress is particularly meaningful when viewed against the challenges the business faced in its early days. The brand had to establish its operations, develop supplier relationships, manage staffing and reduce wastage while building its customer base.
Experience also highlights an important reality of entrepreneurship: launching a business is only the first step. Bigger challenge is building systems that make operations easier to manage and prepare the brand for future growth.
For HungeRex, improvements in staffing, procurement and inventory management have helped create a stronger operational foundation. The next stage will require the food brand to apply those lessons as it enters new markets.
Hyderabad is Next Destination
Having established its presence in Noida, HungeRex is now preparing to expand to other cities. According to Suman, Hyderabad is the next planned destination after Noida.
Expansion could provide an opportunity to reach new customers and establish the brand in another urban market. However, entering a new city also requires a business to understand local preferences, operating costs, supplier availability and customer demand.
For an F&B brand, maintaining consistency across locations is particularly important. Customers expect the same standards of food, service and overall experience even when a brand enters a different market.
HungeRex will need to build on the operational lessons learned in Noida as it enters the next phase of growth. Expansion into Hyderabad is like a new chapter in Suman entrepreneurial journey, but long term success will depend on how effectively this F&B brand manages a larger presence while maintaining operational efficiency and service quality.
A Womenpreneur Journey
Suman Mishra story offers a different perspective on entrepreneurship. Her journey did not begin with a large investment or an established business network. It developed gradually through professional experience, an early business attempt, the setback of the pandemic and the decision to try again.
Along the way, she had to balance family responsibilities with the daily demands of running a food business. Her experience also shows that building an F&B brand requires much more than serving food. Behind every successful service are decisions about staff, suppliers, inventory, customer expectations and costs.
For HungeRex, addressing these operational issues has been an important part of its development. As the brand prepares to enter Hyderabad, the next challenge will be to turn its experience in Noida into a business model that can work across multiple cities.
For Suman, the journey continues. What began as an effort to build a professional identity alongside family responsibilities has developed into a growing business with ambitions beyond its first market.
And perhaps the most important part of her story is this: the challenges did not disappear before she started her business. She learned to manage them while building it.
