How Prachodhaya Foods began in 2018
The year was 2018. Sivakumar S. and Balaji Ramalingam were having dinner at Balaji's home in Pallikaranai when Balaji's mother mentioned, offhand, that she hadn't been able to find good chekku gingelly oil anywhere in the neighbourhood.
It was the kind of thing people say and forget. Sivakumar didn't forget.
He had grown up in a home where gingelly oil was pressed locally, smelled of toasted sesame, and went into everything — the idli batter, the rice, the hair oil. What was available in stores looked the same but tasted like nothing. He knew why: it had been refined, bleached, and deodorized until the seed was just a memory.
"Producing the best quality to the customers is our only gratification" — this line from their first brochure wasn't a marketing slogan. It was a founding principle.
They started with three oils: gingelly, coconut, and groundnut. A small batch, a few customers, word of mouth.
Six years later, Prachodhaya Foods Private Limited serves customers across Chennai, ships to homes across Tamil Nadu, and has expanded to include nattu sakkarai, three podi varieties, thokku, and raw banana powder.
The store is still in Pallikaranai. The phone number is still the same. The oils are still cold-pressed the same way.
Some things are worth not scaling past.
