Most food packaging tells you what is in the pack. Very little tells you who put it there.
Ours is made in Dindigul, in Tamil Nadu, by a production team that is predominantly women, working in a facility we own rather than a contract line we rent time on. That is worth stating plainly, and worth explaining.
Why it is mostly women
Partly because that is who applied, and partly because this is skilled work that a great many women in this district already know how to do and have rarely been paid properly for.
Judging when sprouting grain is ready. Knowing by smell and feel when a batch has dried correctly. Recognising when a spice blend has been milled far enough and when it has gone too far. These are not unskilled tasks. They are the sort of knowledge classed as domestic when it happens at home for free, and as expertise when it happens elsewhere for money.
Formal employment is not a small thing in a district where much of women's work is seasonal, informal, agricultural, and paid at the discretion of whoever is hiring that week.
What we commit to
Specifics rather than adjectives:
- Fair pay for the work, paid on time.
- A clean, ventilated, properly lit facility built for food production, with the hygiene protocols our FSSAI licence requires (Lic. No. 12421006001387).
- Predictable hours. Small-batch production makes this easier than continuous shift work.
- Training that transfers. Someone who learns the sprouting process here holds that skill afterwards, wherever they go.
What we will not do is publish a photograph of our team over a caption about empowerment. The people who work here are employees doing a job well, not a marketing asset, and the difference matters.
Why this shows up in the food
This is the part that sounds sentimental and is actually operational.
Sprouting cannot be fully automated at our scale, and it cannot be inspected after the fact. Once grain has been dried and milled you cannot look at the powder and tell whether it was germinated correctly or held slightly too warm for slightly too long. The quality is decided in the middle of the process, by the person watching it, and it is invisible by the end.
Which means the only real quality control is somebody who knows what they are doing, is paid properly, is not exhausted, and is not being pushed to hit a number. Underpaid, rushed, high-turnover labour produces inconsistent food — not because anyone is careless, but because the judgement calls stop being made carefully.
Fair employment is often described as a cost a company absorbs for ethical reasons. In work like this it is also simply how you get a consistent product.
The scale we are at
We are a small company, founded in 2018, operating from one facility. We will not pretend to a labour policy grander than our size. There is no foundation, no programme, no annual report.
There is a building in Dindigul where a modest number of people are paid properly to make food carefully, and where the person running the technical side is a food technologist rather than a marketer. That is the whole claim, and we would rather make a small one accurately.
If you would like to see what comes out of it, start with the best sellers.
