Are You Eating Chemicals In Your Masala | Dr. Prithwi Singh, Khetika

It is not a question of intent. It is a question of incentive.

Dr. Prithwi Singh started Khetika at the wrong end of the problem on purpose, and spent years walking backwards through the supply chain until he reached the farm.

The sentence above is about farmers, and it is the load-bearing idea of the whole business. Plenty of organisations have gone to Indian farmers and explained what they should do differently: less pesticide, better soil practice, cleaner inputs. Prithwi’s point, drawn partly from his own father’s experience, is that farmers were rarely refusing out of ignorance. They were refusing because nobody had given them a reason to absorb the cost and the risk.

Fix the incentive and the behaviour follows. Skip it and you are running a training programme, not a supply chain.

"Consumers should not need to trust us. They should see the proof and decide."

They started at the far end of the chain

Khetika began in 2017 as SuperZop, a digital distribution platform delivering staples to more than 15,000 kirana stores. That was deliberate. The problem was too complex to attack everywhere at once and a startup does not have unlimited resources, so they started on the demand side to learn how staples actually moved: what sold, at what grade, at what price, through a deeply fragmented chain.

What they found was that the visible problem was not the real one. It wasn’t merely a supply chain problem, it was a consumer awareness problem. In B2B the margins were thinner, the product was unrecognised, and the quality they were paying for was invisible to anyone. There was no way to communicate a benefit or educate a buyer inside an anonymous commodity transaction.

So they moved backwards. Distribution to sourcing, sourcing to cultivation, cultivation to processing. Each fix exposed the layer beneath it.

Three kinds of adulteration, and only one of them is deliberate

Prithwi separates the problem into three. The first is substitution and bulking, where cheaper material is added to increase weight or improve appearance. The second is chemical: colours, dyes and powders added to make old or poor material look and taste acceptable. He gives an example that stops the conversation, which is cumin seeds being fabricated from other material entirely.

The third is the one almost nobody thinks of as adulteration at all, and it is the most widespread. When processing industrialised, the incentive was to cut cost, time and labour, so grinding moved to very high RPM. High speed generates heat, and spices carry volatile essential oils that are extremely sensitive to heat. Grind hot and the compounds that make a spice taste like anything are destroyed before the packet is sealed.

Nobody in that chain intended to sell a worse product. The incentive simply pointed at speed.

Why the spices are ground on stone

This is where the argument becomes a product decision rather than a philosophy. Khetika grinds at low temperature on stone, specifically so the volatile oils survive the process, and sources single-origin so the material has somewhere to come from.

The demonstration Prithwi offers is a smell test, and it is the honest version of the claim. Not a certification, not a front-of-pack line. Open the packet and see whether the coriander smells like coriander. Sourcing gets you good raw material. Low-temperature grinding is what stops you destroying it afterwards.

SAATHI, and why the first centre was hard

The farmer programme is called SAATHI, for Sustainable Agriculture and Training Hub for Impact, and it pairs training with procurement rather than treating them separately. Soil testing, cultivation practice, cleaner inputs, and crucially a dependable buyer at the end of it.

Farmers did not trust it initially, and Prithwi is candid about why. Plenty of people had arrived before with advice and no follow-through. What changed it was staying: working in the local language, training local people, and being visibly present after the first programme ended. A farmer-first model has to feel locally owned before it can scale nationally.

The brand came last, and that was the point

The consumer label was always the plan, but it could not come first, because a brand is a promise and they did not yet control enough of the chain to keep it. COVID pulled demand towards packaged, convenient and health-conscious food, and kirana partners were already asking for products customers could recognise and ask for by name.

A branded product also solved the communication problem that B2B never could. It creates a surface on which you can explain why a better ingredient costs more, and it makes the farmer’s work and the processor’s care legible instead of dissolving them into a commodity price.

Proof instead of trust

The most useful idea in the conversation is the smallest. Prithwi does not want customers to trust the brand. He wants to hand them evidence and let them decide.

In practice that means QR-led traceability on the pack, so a customer can look at where a batch came from and what testing it went through, rather than reading an adjective on the front. It is a meaningfully different posture from most of the category, which asks for belief and offers a certification mark in return.

And it is commercially self-interested in the right way. If your differentiation is real, evidence is cheaper than advertising. If it isn’t, evidence is the last thing you would publish.

The thing he actually wants

Prithwi frames the goal as bigger than the packet: consumers asking where food came from, what was added to it, how it was processed, and whether the person who grew it was rewarded for growing it better. He points out that when consumers start asking those questions, the whole value chain has to answer them, which is already visible in how regulation is moving.

His closing thought is a domestic one. Our dadis and naanis knew this instinctively. Sourcing, grinding, storage, season and purpose were all part of the knowledge attached to a spice. A modern food brand cannot rebuild every household ritual. It can restore the context, and give a customer enough information to choose properly.

Listen to the full conversation with Dr. Prithwi Singh on FyndOutWithRagini.