Gurugram : Salad Days, India’s pioneering brand in the healthy foods category, has announced the appointment of Parthsarthi Gupta as Chief Financial Officer. The appointment carries an unusual thread: Parthsarthi was on the other side of the table first. As a Founding Member of Client Associates Alternate Fund (CAAF), he diligenced and led execution on Salad Days’ own Series A, then chose to leave investing and join the business he had backed.
At Salad Days, Parthsarthi’s mandate runs broader than a typical CFO remit. On the core finance side, he owns financial planning and analysis, treasury and banking relationships, statutory and tax compliance, and capital structuring. He is also building out the company’s central data warehouse and MIS function, bringing together data across kitchens, cities and channels into a single, reliable system used to drive operational performance and scale. His role extends into strategy as well, partnering closely with founder Varun Madan on channel and product expansion and new product development. A central part of his current focus is preparing Salad Days for its next fund-raise over the next 9 to 12 months, spanning financial controls, data infrastructure, and investor relations.
Commenting on the appointment, Varun Madan, Founder & CEO, Salad Days, said, “As Salad Days moves into its next phase of growth, having the right financial and data infrastructure in place becomes critical to how we scale. Parthsarthi brings a rare vantage point to this role: he led the diligence on our own Series A before joining us, so he understands the discipline behind our growth better than most external hires would. His mandate goes beyond finance. He’s building the data and MIS systems that will give us a single source of truth across our kitchens and cities, while also working closely with us on strategy as we prepare for our next fund-raise. This is exactly the kind of structured, fundamentals-first approach we’ve always believed in, and having someone with his combination of investing and operating experience lead it gives us real confidence as we scale.”
Speaking on his move from investor to operator, Parthsarthi Gupta, Chief Financial Officer, Salad Days, said, “I backed Salad Days as an investor before I joined it, and I’d been a customer for years before that, ordering in as a renter in Gurugram long before I ever diligenced the business. So my conviction here was built from three sides: as a customer, as a banker who watched this category form, and as the investor who chose to back it. Crossing over to help build it from the inside felt like the natural next step. Salad Days has earned a rare thing in this category, a profitable, disciplined business with a genuinely loyal customer base, and my job now is to give it the financial and data backbone to scale that without losing what makes it work, and to make sure we’re ready, financially and operationally, well ahead of our next chapter of growth.”
Parthsarthi joins Salad Days after nearly a decade in investment banking and alternative assets at Client Associates, where he most recently helped launch and scale Client Associates Alternate Fund (CAAF), the firm’s first move into asset management. As a Founding Member, he led execution on four of the fund’s five portfolio investments, including Salad Days.
Parthsarthi holds a Post Graduate Programme in Management from the Indian School of Business and a Bachelor’s in Finance and Investment Analysis from SSCBS, Delhi University.
Salad Days operated profitably on a bootstrapped basis for close to a decade before taking any institutional capital, with its Series A positioned as validation of a working model rather than a growth lifeline. Parthsarthi’s appointment extends that same discipline into the company’s next phase, pairing a founder who proved the model on a decade of fundamentals-first growth with the investor who vetted that rigour and is now building the financial and data infrastructure to scale it.