Sourcing
We buy from small Indian farms and family-run mills, the kind that the supermarket buyer drives past on the way to the bigger ones. This is what that means in practice.
Heirloom rice
Mappillai Samba, Karuppu Kavuni, Navara, Seeraga Samba, Athur Kichili — varieties the green revolution almost wiped out. We work with the seed-saver networks in Tamil Nadu and Kerala that brought them back, sometimes from a few kilograms of remaining seed. Each bag we ship is a vote for keeping these grains alive.
Cold-pressed oils
Industrial sesame and groundnut oil is extracted with hexane at 200°C, then bleached and deodorised. Ours is pressed in a wooden chekku — a stone and wood mortar turned at low rpm — at near room temperature. Dark, fragrant, unrefined. The way every South Indian household kitchen used to keep its oil before the war.
Kolli Hills spices
Black pepper, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves and kalpasi all come from the Kolli Hills — a forest spice belt in the Eastern Ghats of Tamil Nadu where the climate, soil and elevation grow some of the most aromatic spice crops in South India. Whole, never pre-ground. Turmeric is sun-dried and stone-ground, with curcumin well above the mass-market average. Each tested for adulterants. The FSSAI seizes tonnes of fake turmeric every year — none of it from our chain.
Unrefined sweeteners
Our palm jaggery is made by climbing a palmyra tree at dawn, collecting the day's sap, and reducing it slowly over a wood fire. That's the entire process. No chemicals, no whitening, no centrifuge to pull out the molasses. Iron, magnesium and B-vitamins all intact — the opposite of refined white sugar.
The pulses
Most supermarket toor and urad dal is polished with mineral oil and sometimes dyed for shelf appeal. Ours isn't. The cooked dal is duller in colour, and tastes — without exception — better.
What we won't sell
A note from us
We're a small operation. We'll never compete with Tesco on price, and we don't want to. What we can do is bring you the food the supermarket aisle quietly stopped carrying — and tell you, honestly, where every gram of it came from.
Browse the pantry