Hyderabad Founders Build Clean-Label Organic Food Ecosystem, Asking India To Count Chemicals Not Just Calories - Have 60% Repeat Customers

“Not everything natural is clean. And not everything clean is certified.”

This simple belief is what shaped Frissly, a Hyderabad-born organic food brand built on an uncompromising promise — to bring back honesty to everyday food.

For the founding brothers, Pratap Varma and Raj Valivarti, clean eating is not a trend or a marketing angle. It is a responsibility. A commitment to create food that is completely free from chemicals, refined flours, refined sugars, preservatives, artificial colours, or synthetic additives of any kind, allowing every product to remain in its purest, most authentic form.

Over the years, they realised a truth most consumers never think about: everyone counts calories, but rarely does anyone count chemicals.

“This is where the real problem lies. Parents want to give their children the best. Families want to eat better. But the market doesn’t offer clean, trustworthy choices. That’s when we knew we had to step in — not just to build a brand, but to give the next generation a safer alternative,” Pratap Varma, co-founder of Frissly, tells Startup Pedia in an exclusive interview.

And that is how Frissly was born – as a clean-label ecosystem where every ingredient is organic certified, every recipe is made-from-scratch, and every product is prepared in small batches.

Launched in 2025, Frissly operates as a certified organic food brand offering an extensive range of chemical-free snacks, batters, bakery items, flours, sweets, staples, and innovative ready-to-eat products — all made without a single adulterated or synthetic ingredient.

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THE BACKGROUND

Driven by a deep curiosity about where food truly comes from, Pratap began noticing something that disturbed him deeply. Across India, especially in rural belts like Punjab, cancer cases were rising at an alarming rate — so much so that the now-famous “Punjab cancer train” became a national discussion.

These were not people living in polluted metros or industrial zones. These were farmers and families in remote villages, surrounded by open fields, clean air, and simple food.

When he understood it was all about the chemicals in the farming that they are exposed to, he wondered what really happened.

“I began asking myself: India was naturally organic just a few decades ago, how did organic farming suddenly become the hardest thing to do?” entrepreneur Pratap says.

This question became the spark.

He wanted to understand what had changed — in the soil, in farming practices, and in the food entering people’s homes.

That curiosity pushed him into farming himself, and soon into travelling across India to see what was happening on the ground.

Over the next several years, he clocked nearly 1.7–2 lakh kilometres, moving from village to village, speaking to farmers, observing cultivation practices, and learning how food was grown, stored, priced, and finally consumed.

What he saw revealed two very different sides of India.

On one side were farmers working tirelessly, often without proper guidance, support, or awareness. Synthetic fertilizers had become the norm — India consumed 70.70 million metric tonnes of fertilizers in 2024–25, nearly 90% of which were chemical-based.

Almost 60,000 tonnes of pesticides were being sprayed every year, including chemicals restricted or banned in other parts of the world.

All of this was silently entering the soil, water, and eventually the food chain.

On the other side, Pratap also met hundreds of organic farmers — people practicing clean farming with extraordinary depth and discipline. They understood their soil, seeds, climate, water cycles, and pest behaviour with an instinct passed down for generations.

Organic farming wasn’t new to India; it was the country’s original way of growing food.

“These farmers were doing everything right. They nurtured their soil, protected biodiversity, and grew food with integrity. Their commitment was far stronger than any certification form,” Pratap recalls.

Yet despite their knowledge and sincerity, organic farmers across India faced the same painful reality: they had no real market.

And soon, Pratap experienced it himself when he started organic farming on his own land.

Organic farmers do not use subsidised fertilizers like urea, DAP, or chemical pesticides.

• Their costs are higher.
• Their yields are cleaner.
• Their effort is greater.

But when they took this produce to mandis, they were offered the same price as chemically grown crops, sometimes even less.

They couldn’t sell it as Organic. They couldn’t differentiate themselves. And no dedicated marketplaces were willing to support real organic growers.

On one side were organic farmers who couldn’t sell their honest produce. On the other side were consumers desperately searching for the same honest produce.

“Consumers wanted clean food. Farmers were growing clean food. But everything in between was broken,” startup founder Pratap remarks.

This contradiction is what pushed him to take his first in his journey.

To bridge this gap, he launched Rythu Online Store. The idea was simple yet transformational:

Connect organic farmers directly to families — no middlemen, no manipulation, no compromise.

Fresh, seasonal, chemical-free produce was delivered straight from the fields to homes. The response was overwhelming, proving that honest food still had a place in Indian kitchens.

Encouraged by this trust, Pratap expanded the model into Farmer’s Best Supermarkets, taking farm-fresh produce offline and closer to urban households.

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THE TURNING POINT OF COVID + INSIGHTS FROM PARENTS

But then came COVID — and it had very different plans. Within weeks, logistics across the country collapsed. Trucks stopped moving. Suppliers disappeared.

Farmers were forced to sell whatever they grew in nearby villages because there was no functioning supply chain left.

The model Pratap had built with such care suddenly had no backbone. And yet, something else was happening during this time that would shape the next chapter of his journey.

As part of his everyday work, Pratap spent hours talking to families, especially parents. Almost every conversation came back to the same worry:

“Our kids don’t eat home food anymore.” 

“Even if we buy organic groceries and vegetables, they still want outside snacks.”

“Where do we find clean, organic snacks or packaged foods for them?”

And the painful truth was: there were barely any options in the market.

Mothers were struggling.
Parents were helpless.

Children were growing up on highly processed, adulterated foods — simply because there were no clean alternatives available.

These questions stayed with Pratap long after the conversations ended. They repeated in his mind during the lockdown, during the disruption, even during his quietest moments.

For the first time, he realised that the real problem wasn’t just vegetables or groceries.

The real danger lay in packaged foods — the snacks, baked items, and ready-to-eat products that children consumed every single day.

COVID had paused life.

But it also gave him the time and the clarity to think about what the next chapter of food needed to be. And this is where the idea of building a clean-label, chemical-free, certified organic food ecosystem first began to take shape

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BUILDING CLEAN FOOD THE HARD WAY

The COVID-19 pandemic gave Pratap time to pause, but it also forced him to confront a deeper truth.

If clean food for children and families didn’t exist in the packaged food market, it wasn’t because demand was missing — it was because the system was built around shortcuts.

To change that, brothers Raj and Pratap decided to move beyond fresh produce and groceries. They set out to create clean, ready-to-eat and packaged foods — snacks, bakery items, staples, and everyday foods — without compromising on health or honesty.

What sounded simple on paper turned out to be the hardest part of the journey.

The team began by hiring senior chefs, followed by international chefs and food technologists.

Everyone tried.
And everyone said the same thing.

“You can’t do this without glucose or invert syrup.”
“You won’t get texture without refined flour.”
“You need emulsifiers for consistency.”
“Preservatives are unavoidable.”

Some even told them they were wasting time and money. But Pratap wasn’t convinced.

“When these recipes were first created decades ago, there was no adulteration. All the shortcuts came later — for convenience, shelf life, and scale,” startup founder Pratap Varma says.

That belief pushed him deeper into food science.

He began studying how ingredients behave with each other, how structure is formed naturally, and how traditional recipes achieved taste, texture, and stability without chemicals.

At the same time, the team went back in time — revisiting age-old Indian cooking techniques, regional food traditions, and methods that existed long before modern additives entered kitchens.

One decision changed everything.

They stopped hiring chefs.

Instead, they brought in homemakers — people who had cooked clean food their entire lives, without chemicals, without shortcuts. These home cooks added intuition, patience, and practical wisdom that no professional training could replace.

“They didn’t need to unlearn anything,” Pratap explains. “They already knew how to make food honest.”

What followed was nearly two to three years of intense R&D — failed batches, reformulations, testing, and learning. Slowly, product by product, the impossible began to work.

Clean food.
Packaged food.
Without chemicals.

Today, that journey has resulted in 300+ certified organic products, all built on the same uncompromising principles.

But the founders were clear about one thing — claims were not enough. If they were going to do this, it had to be proven.

That decision led them to the most rigorous certification path possible.

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WHY CERTIFICATION MATTERED MORE THAN MARKETING

As the product range slowly took shape, the founders were clear about one thing — calling something organic was not enough.

In a market crowded with labels, buzzwords, and half-truths, they had seen how easily trust could be broken. Too many brands were selling “organic” as a story, not as a responsibility. Pratap and Raj didn’t want Frissly to become another name-making claims without proof.

“If we were asking families to trust us with their children’s food, then that trust had to be backed by something stronger than our words,” Pratap says.

That belief led them to make one of the toughest decisions in their journey.

They temporarily slowed down operations and began rebuilding everything — from sourcing and processing to hygiene, storage, documentation, and traceability — to meet the most stringent organic and food safety standards.

This was not a checklist exercise.

It was a complete reset.

Every ingredient had to be traceable.

Every process had to be documented.

Every cleaning method had to be chemical-free.

Every batch had to be accountable.

“There were moments when we thought we were finally ready, only to be told we had to change something again,”Raj recalls.

“But we realised that this is exactly how it should be. Organic food cannot afford shortcuts.”

One incident, in particular, stayed with them.

During an inspection, the team was pulled up for using a commonly available cleaning solution for utensils — something that most food businesses wouldn’t think twice about. The certification was immediately denied.

“That day made things very clear,” Raj says.

“Organic doesn’t stop at ingredients. It extends to everything that touches the food.”

From that point on, even cleaning processes were redesigned — using natural, certification-compliant methods such as lemon-based cleaning — ensuring zero chemical contact at any stage.

After nearly two years of rigorous preparation, audits, corrections, and compliance, the team finally achieved what they had set out to do:

• India Organic certification under NPOP standards

• HACCP certification

• ISO 22000 food safety management certification

• GMP compliance

• Jaivik Bharat recognition

For the founders, these certifications were not milestones to showcase — they were guardrails.

“They don’t make us better than others. They make us accountable — every single day,”Pratap remarks.

Only after this foundation was firmly in place did the brothers feel ready to bring Frissly to life.

INTRODUCING FRISSLY: BUILDING A TRULY CLEAN-LABEL FOOD ECOSYSTEM

With the foundation finally in place, Frissly was launched in 2025 — not as just another organic brand, but as an attempt to rebuild trust in everyday food.

For Pratap and Raj, Frissly was never meant to be a single product line.

It was designed as an ecosystem — one clean-label roof where families could find food that was genuinely safe, transparent, and uncompromised.

“At this point, we weren’t trying to impress anyone,” Pratap says.

“We were trying to protect families — especially children — from what had silently become normal in packaged food.”

Frissly operates from its owned manufacturing facility in Hyderabad and follows a made-to-order approach wherever possible. Every product is prepared using certified organic ingredients, without refined flours, refined sugars, refined oils, chemicals, preservatives, artificial flavours, colours, or synthetic additives of any kind.

“These are not flexible guidelines,”Raj explains. “They are rules we don’t bend — even if it slows us down.”

From Kitchen Staples to Everyday Foods

Frissly’s range gradually expanded across categories that Indian families consume daily:

• Fresh batters and doughs

• Bakery items and snacks

• Traditional Indian sweets and savouries

• Ready-to-eat and ready-to-cook foods

• Staples, flours, premixes, and powders

• Dairy-based products and innovations

Each product followed the same process — slow formulation, repeated testing, and constant refinement — until it met both taste expectations and clean-label standards.

“Good food should never feel like a compromise,” Pratap says.

“If it’s clean but not tasty, families won’t adopt it. If it’s tasty but not clean, we won’t sell it.”

That balance became the core of Frissly’s philosophy.

Restoring Trust, One Product at a Time

In an industry where trust has been eroded by misleading labels and vague claims, Frissly chose a different path — radical transparency.

Every batch is traceable.

Every ingredient is documented.

Every process is accountable.

Customers are not asked to believe — they are shown.

“Organic today has become a word anyone can use,” Pratap says.

“But certification, traceability, and process discipline — those can’t be faked.”

GROWTH, CUSTOMER TRUST & THE ROAD AHEAD

What followed the launch of Frissly was not overnight virality or aggressive marketing — it was something far more meaningful: trust built slowly, product by product, family by family.

Customers who discovered Frissly didn’t come looking for discounts or trends.

They came looking for answers — about ingredients, sourcing, certifications, and processes. And when they found clarity, they stayed.

Over time, this translated into a strong repeat customer base, with nearly 60% of customers returning — a signal that families were not just trying Frissly, but choosing it again and again.

“We don’t chase one-time purchases,” Raj explains.

“We focus on building habits. If a family trusts us once and comes back, we know we’re doing something right.”

Frissly’s growth has been organic in the truest sense — driven largely by word-of-mouth, parent communities, and customers who felt relieved to finally find food they didn’t have to second-guess.

But the founders are clear: growth is not the end goal.

For Pratap and Raj, Frissly’s real purpose lies beyond metrics.

“Every decision we take is with the next generation in mind,”Pratap says.

“The food habits we normalize today will define their health tomorrow.”

As Frissly expands its footprint, the focus remains the same:

• Expanding access to clean, certified organic food

• Creating better packaged food alternatives for children and families

• Supporting organic farmers through fair value addition

• Educating consumers on how to identify real organic food

• Raising the bar for transparency and accountability in the food industry

The team also plans to onboard third-party brands onto the Frissly platform — but only after they meet the same stringent standards around ingredients, certifications, and processes.

“Organic cannot be a compromise,” Raj adds.

“If it doesn’t meet our rules, it doesn’t come onto our platform.”

“The next time we choose food for our families, we should ask one simple question — not just how many calories it has, but how many chemicals it carries. Clean food shouldn’t be a privilege. It should be the default,” Pratap Varma signs off.