A can of Quenzy looks deliberate before you even taste it. Soft gradient, a cloud illustration on the Orange Cream flavour, a name that sounds like it was always meant to exist. What the can does not show is that it took eight months of formulation work and eighty-three discarded names before it looked like this at all.
Quenzy did not start as a business plan. It started as a gap Anushka Sharma kept noticing in her own life. As she became more mindful of her health, particularly gut health, she realised how little existed that balanced taste with function. Her own words on it are simple: "We shouldn't have to give up things we love just to make better choices." The trade-off she kept running into was straightforward: healthier drinks demanding she sacrifice taste, regular soda giving her the experience but none of the function. What if soda didn't have to be the compromise.
The brand entered a functional beverage market where many brands were already selling some version of the health-and-wellness proposition. Sharma came into it without a beverage background. Her own X bio lists prior product management roles at Amazon and L'Oréal, and her LinkedIn lists a Masters in Management from ESCP Business School. Read generously, it points to a founder more inclined to treat a product as a series of deliberate decisions than chase a single big idea, a pattern that shows up repeatedly in how the brand got built.
Eight months of getting it right
Quenzy's public proposition is straightforward on paper: under 15 calories a can, 5g of prebiotic fibre, no added sugar. Getting there wasn't. Building a soda that didn't taste medicinal or read like a wellness lecture took eight months of formulation trials, ingredient research, and taste testing before the product matched the idea in Sharma's head. The product wasn't built by deciding what sounded healthy. It was built by figuring out what people would actually want to drink again, can after can, not just once out of curiosity.
The 83 names that never became Quenzy
On LinkedIn, Sharma wrote plainly: "We went through 83 names before we landed on Quenzy." Not a typo. Eighty-three. It is a small detail, but it says something about how deliberately the brand was being built.
Brand building, in her case, looks less like landing on one perfect answer and more like eliminating every wrong one until only Quenzy was left standing. That instinct carried into the visual identity too. Every flavour was tied to an emotion rather than just a taste note. Orange Cream carries clouds on the can, a quiet nod to childhood summer holidays. Blueberry Lychee carries mountain silhouettes, referencing where both fruits grow and the sense of wanderlust that comes with it. Cucumber Mint was designed to feel like a Sunday morning reset. As Sharma put it, she didn't want the cans to just look pretty. She wanted them to be an emotion, with a human-first touch built into every design choice.
None of that reads like a conventional "health drink." That appears to be exactly the point: making a functional beverage feel less clinical and more like something people would actually want on their shelf, not something prescribed to them.
Solo founder, full stack
Sharma has described running Quenzy without a founding team: "When you're a solo founder, your tools quietly become your team. They're the ones you brainstorm with, rely on, and build alongside every day." Beyond her, the crew includes Samata Mehta, who Dhruv Agrawal has described in his own post as "the force behind marketing at Quenzy," and Agrawal himself, whose LinkedIn title reads Head of Growth at the company. No co-founder, no founding team absorbing the early chaos. Just her, the product, and a growing list of decisions that came with building it.
That solo-founder pressure is also visible in how hands-on Quenzy's distribution has been. Sharma has personally run city pop-up outreach, sought out college and corporate sampling collaborations, and hired short-term interns for on-ground activations, the unglamorous groundwork that rarely shows up in a founder's highlight reel but is what actually gets a beverage brand into new hands.
The Amazon unlock
The Amazon story offers a different kind of business lesson. Quenzy had been sitting on Amazon for a while without being pushed hard. Then Amazon removed referral fees for its category, and the team decided to start scaling on the platform. Within days, two of its flavours became Amazon's Choice, a position they held for almost a week. Sharma's own read on it: "Crazy how one unlock can change momentum. Timing plus distribution is moat."
It's a reminder that growth isn't always about pushing harder on the same lever. Sometimes it's about noticing when a structural shift, one you didn't cause, opens a door, and moving fast enough to walk through it before the window closes.
One year in
Quenzy has since expanded well beyond its original online listing, into vending machines, quick commerce platforms, e-commerce, and cafés, with a growing B2B side reaching offices and corporate partners. The brand marked its first anniversary with a single post that folded both milestones into one moment: one year in business, and the launch of three new flavours, Cola, Coffee, and Nimbu Shikanji, alongside it. Sharma framed the pairing as a marker of everything that had gone into getting there: R&D sessions, packaging iterations, and production runs that started, in her words, from a blank sheet of paper.
What comes next
Eighty-three rejected names are history now. So are the early formulation trials nobody outside the company ever tasted. Sharma has said the goal for year two is more flavours, new partnerships, and bigger ambitions, but the harder test was never getting people to try Quenzy once. It's whether a can built around emotion and detail can turn into something people reach for out of habit rather than curiosity.
TEP Verdict: The story so far is not a case of a founder stumbling into a good idea. Eighty-three rejected names and eight months of formulation trials point to a founder who defaults to process over instinct, and that discipline is visible in how deliberately the product and brand were built. But the Amazon moment complicates any tidy narrative of pure execution: a fee change she did not create is what turned distribution into a real unlock, and being ready to move on it mattered as much as the groundwork before it. That mix, careful process meeting a timing break she didn't control, is closer to the real story than either "she built this alone through sheer discipline" or "she got lucky." Whether Quenzy becomes a habit brand or stays a well-designed debut still depends on what she does with the next unlock, not the last one.