Native ingredients. No substitutes.
Peresandra, Chikkaballapur — where the red soil grows groundnut and every second household knows what fresh oil is supposed to smell like.
Our grandfather ran a wooden ghani behind the house in Peresandra. Farmers walked over with a sack of their own groundnuts, waited under the tamarind tree, and walked back with their own oil. Nothing was branded. Nothing needed to be.
Then refined oil arrived in tins, cheaper by half, and the ghani slowed to a stop for almost a decade. We started it again in 2019 — same wooden press, same slow rotation, same farmers. The only thing that changed is that the oil now goes into glass bottles instead of the customer's own can, and travels further than the next village.
We buy from about fourteen farming families within an hour of the unit, and we pay above the mandi rate for clean, well-dried produce. That is the whole supply chain. When a season is poor, we press less rather than buying lots from elsewhere — which is why a product occasionally goes out of stock here and we would rather it did.
If you have ever wondered why homemade food tasted different at your grandmother's house, a lot of it was the oil.
Naidu Organics, Peresandra, Chikkaballapur, Karnataka