Quaker's Dohale Jevan film makes a baby shower the stage for child nutrition

Quaker's Bowl of Growth programme, run with NGO MAMTA HIMC and the Maharashtra government, fed children aged 3–5 at anganwadis and educated caregivers in rural Pune blocks. To turn that work into community awareness, the brand needed a story that made nutrition feel cultural rather than clinical.

Use Maharashtra's Dohale Jevan baby-shower ritual: a malnourished boy travels to his mother's ceremony so celebrating birth also means feeding the child after.

Leo Burnett India and Chrome Pictures made Quaker's first long-format film, 'Dohale Jevan Poshanchi Vaati', shot in remote villages with cross-city casting of non-actors and an original song. Its narrator is a thin five-year-old boy travelling for his mother's Dohale Jevan — the Marathi baby-shower ceremony held in the seventh to ninth month of pregnancy — who is worried that his unborn sibling may share his own struggle with hunger.

The film gave the Bowl of Growth programme an awareness leg rooted in a familiar ritual, reached national press at launch in April 2024, and was later recognised with Bronze at Effie India 2025 in the Foods – Staples category.

Quaker's Bowl of Growth programme attacked child malnutrition in rural Maharashtra through three pillars: feeding children aged 3–5 at anganwadis, educating parents and caregivers, and spreading awareness across the community. With one in four Indian children malnourished, the brand's own research pointed at a cultural gap — nutrition advice arrived as an outsider's lecture, not a local concern.

For the awareness pillar, Leo Burnett India and Chrome Pictures wrote Quaker's first long-format film around Dohale Jevan, the revered Marathi baby shower held during the seventh to ninth month of pregnancy. The film's narrator is a thin five-year-old boy travelling to his mother's ceremony, excited about the celebration yet quietly afraid that the sibling on the way might grow up hungry as he did — so the ritual of blessing the unborn child becomes a question about feeding the child after birth.

Shot in remote villages with non-actors cast across cities and an original song by Rohan-Vinayak with lyrics by Swanand Kirkire, the film was released in April 2024 and covered by national advertising press as Quaker's first long-format work. It anchored a programme that had already embedded cultural elements such as panjiri food at anganwadis, and later took Bronze at Effie India 2025 in Foods – Staples.

Dohale Jevan gave the brand a permission slip: malnutrition messaging entered homes through a celebration the community already holds, not through a clinic-style warning.

Seeing the issue through a hungry child's eyes made the unborn sibling's fate the story's stakes, turning a national statistic into a family's decision.

The long-format film and original song treated rural viewers as an audience to move, not a problem to manage, which is why casting non-actors from the region kept it believable.

The film was the awareness leg of a running programme, so a piece of content pointed at real anganwadi feeding rather than standing alone as advertising.

Put the message inside a ritual the audience already keeps: celebrating the unborn child let Quaker raise what happens after birth without lecturing a community.

The film became the public face of Quaker's Bowl of Growth programme in Maharashtra, which continued its three pillars of feeding, caregiver education and community awareness. In 2025 the work was cited in Effie India's effectiveness awards with a Bronze in Foods – Staples; PepsiCo framed the whole effort under its Positive Choices agenda of widening access to nutritious food.