A taste of the terrain: How niche food brands travel from hinterland India to your pantry

Add the latest end-use of madhuca longifolia, the scientific name for the mahua tree: turn its bitter-sweet flowers into fine chocolates and granola for the discerning and well-paying urban consumer.

Meet Rishabh Lohia, a young social entrepreneur from Ranchi in Jharkhand, giving mahua the contemporary makeover. A former student of economics who found inspiration in Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s writings, Lohia left his family’s real estate business in 2024 to launch Wild Harvest, a packaged food brand specializing in mahua products.

For Lohia and his partner Ashali Bhandari, building Wild Harvest is akin to creating a new category in the ever-expanding fast-moving consumer goods basket. At the back-end, the duo is focused on changing practices—like no burning of leaf litter which often leads to forest fires (deciduous mahua trees first shed their leaves followed by flowers, so locals usually burn the leaf litter to clear the ground beneath). Instead, the flowers are collected by spreading nets overground. Tribal collectors are usually paid a 50% premium over the going market price for sun-dried, food-grade flowers.

“Our goal is to make ethically-sourced mahua flowers a model for co-existence and sustainable livelihood and introduce this superfood—which once saved thousands of lives during famines—to urban consumers,” Lohia said.

By no means is turning mahua into FMCG a one-off story.

Venture capital funds are betting on these brands: in September last year, Two Brothers raised a $15 million round taking its total fundraise to $25 million (and its post-money valuation to $85 million or ₹781 crore as per data from market intelligence platform Tracxn). The company, which pioneered stone-ground emmer wheat back in 2017, ended up creating a new flour category, in fact. Multiple brands offer Khapli atta now, including the likes of ITC Ltd, which owns Aashirvaad, India’s largest wheat flour label.

In April this year, KisaanSay, which markets single-origin grocery items like cardamom from Idukki and black raisins from Nashik, raised ₹34 crore ($3.6 million) taking the total funding at the Gurugram-based startup to $5.6 million since it was set up in mid-2022. It co-brands staples and shares profit with farmer groups, aiming to lend daily use grocery items a distinct regional identity.

In a way, these brands have also helped promote traditional farming practices with more farmers returning to heirloom grain varieties such as the fragrant, short-grain Kala Namak rice grown in eastern Uttar Pradesh and emmer wheat in Maharashtra and Karnataka. These grains have a low glycemic index (a measure of the spike in blood sugar levels from carbohydrate intake) making them suitable for diabetics and often have higher protein and fiber content compared to conventional hybrid varieties.

The surge in regional and artisanal ingredients comes piggybacking the highly popular food-related content on social media platforms such as Instagram, said Vernika Awal, a Noida-based food writer and consultant. “If you want to make an authentic khatti-meethi Gujrati dal, you have to use Kokum for the sweet-sour balance.” Kokum is a deep purple tropical fruit grown in coastal Maharashtra, used as a souring agent and known for its cooling properties.

So, in a way, three distinct factors—growing consumer willingness to pay for clean food driven by a surge in lifestyle diseases, the rise of quick commerce (allowing brands to quickly test consumer response), and influence of social media platforms are reshaping the premium staples market.

Anveshan sources ingredients from key growing regions—like Pollachi in Tamil Nadu known for its high-quality coconuts and aromatic varieties of groundnut from elsewhere in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka—suited to make cold-pressed oils. The ghee, made from the milk of native breeds like the Gir from Gujarat is made using the traditional bilona process where milk is first set to curd and later churned to separate the butter (this has resulted in a new category called ‘cultured ghee’).

A section of Indian consumers has turned conscious of what they are putting into their bodies, a kind of a food correction you may call it, Parewa said. “We source our produce from the best growing regions and test every batch for impurities. The milk is tested for both hormones like oxytocin (used to increase milk output) and antibiotic residues.”

These oils and ghee are two to three times more expensive than conventional products, yet Anveshan has grown rapidly. In fiscal 2026, it clocked a revenue of ₹195 crore, more than doubling its ₹78 crore sales in the previous fiscal. In 2020-21, the year it was set up, Anveshan’s revenues were ₹2.6 crore.

Sangeetha Deiveegarajan, a Chennai-based wealth management professional, is what you might call a conscious consumer. “These new brands have introduced me to clean and organically grown staples. Once you understand the production process, which they explain at great length, the price does not seem exorbitant,” she said. “I not only use these staples for my own kitchen but also gift them to friends and family,” she added.

Once when she ordered a bilona (cultured) ghee-jar spending over ₹12,000, her family called her crazy. “But I owe my immunity and my ability to do Himalayan treks to the good and clean food I have access to. Paying a premium for clean food is a worthy investment.”

Like Parewa, Satyajit Hange, co-founder of Two Brothers Organic Farms has a strong farm connection. He grew up in the family farm in rural Pune and went to a boarding school. The grind of a corporate job brought him back to the farm where he toyed with conventional farming and crops like sugarcane and banana with brother and co-founder Ajinkya.

Their journey eventually took a turn towards organic farming and traditional methods of primary processing to make ghee, jaggery, Khapli flour, and cold-pressed oils. The jaggery is made using native sugarcane with lady finger extract used as a coagulant. “In Khapli, we have created a revolution. We own a seed bank and pay farmers 2.5-times the price of regular wheat. More than 800 farmers grow this wheat for us in 3,000+ acres,” Satyajit said.

“It took us ten years to build this brand. At the back-end, our farms are open to everyone (to visit). Consumers trust us and we have a 70% retention rate. But a proliferation of brands (offering traditional, hand-processed staples) also carries the risk of a dilution in quality standards,” he added with a note of caution.

Nolen gur is an aromatic, liquid jaggery made from freshly tapped date palm sap and prized for its woody, caramel-like flavor. “In jaggery, we own the entire value chain. The sap is collected by our tappers and we have revived traditional practices like collecting the sap in earthen pots, rotating of trees from where the sap is collected, slow-cooking the sap using specific types of wood (like Sonajhuri) which lend the jaggery a distinct flavor,” said Senjuti Mahato, co-founder at Earth Story Farms.

As per Mahato, a former advertising professional, Earth Story Farms was set up as an experiment against a food system optimized for months-long shelf life.

“We are trying to serve traditional products in modern formats; 85% of our orders are from outside of Bengal,” Mahato added. The company clocked a revenue of ₹2.2 crore in 2025-26 and is targetting the ₹100 crore milestone in four-five years.

Cross-country peer, Mumbai’s Aazol was set up as a social enterprise to promote food items, grown and processed by women from rural Maharashtra. In Marathi, aazol means grandmother’s home.

“We specialize in heritage grains and food items which rural communities are unable to market on their own and urban consumers lost touch with,” said Apurva Purohit, co-founder of Aazol and a former media professional. There is an emerging consumer base looking for clean ingredients and bouncing away from ultra processed foods, she added.

Among Aazol’s highest selling items are Kokum fruit extract sourced from the Konkan region and Indrayani, a sticky and aromatic rice grown by tribal farmers of Dhule in Maharashtra. Aazol also sells mango pulp sourced from Devgad, famous for its Alphonso mangoes. Each item listed on its website comes with its provenance (place of origin) and details of partner-manufacturers.

Consumers, it seems are willing to pay hefty sums for nutritious and chemical residue free regional specialties – think of a ₹2,000 per litre ghee or ₹350 per kg rice—which are often delivered to them at lightning speed, thanks to quick commerce platforms. But is it money’s worth?

Here’s what Alice Waters, a pioneering American chef and food activist, had to say in a 2015 interview:

“We need to really know where our food comes from and to be able to support the people who are doing the right things…You can’t possibly have cheap food…when it’s cheap, somebody is missing out, and nine out of ten times it’s the farmer.”

In the Indian context, cheap food has other consequences: poor soil health due to overuse of chemicals to maximize output and food bereft of nutrients or laden with residues. Stone-ground Emmer wheat, granola made with consciously-collected mahua flowers, sustainably-made nolen gur, then, may be actually good for the land and not just a passing consumer fancy.