Our Story · two hands
Two people. One correction.
India grows spice to a standard the rest of the world pays for, and sells its own kitchens something else. Fixing that needs two different kinds of knowing, and neither of us has both. So this page is not a profile of two founders. It is the two halves, laid side by side, so you can see where they have to meet.
Sushant Dhar
The standard
Sanjay Kaul
The reach
- What he knows
Sushant Dhar
What export grade actually means when you are standing on the floor where it is decided — the moisture band, the residue limit, the lot that gets held back and the lot that ships.
Sanjay Kaul
How a product physically reaches a country: distributor by distributor, shelf by shelf, in a market where the best thing on the truck still loses to the thing the shopkeeper can move.
- Where he learned it
Sushant Dhar
Studied and worked abroad, came home, and went to work inside the spice manufacturing that supplies the export buyers. He saw the gap from the inside: export-grade spice leaving by the tonne and rarely turning up on a shelf here.
Sanjay Kaul
Thirty-seven years at Nestlé, a full career in FMCG sales. Long enough to have watched good products fail for reasons that had nothing to do with the product.
- What it lets Story Roots do
Sushant Dhar
Hold the same specification at home that the export buyer is sold — and print the licence number that lets you confirm who is holding it.
Sanjay Kaul
Put it somewhere an ordinary shopper can actually buy it, at a price that is not an apology for the quality.
Where they close
One built the standard from the inside. The other knows how to carry it to the country.
Both families are from Kashmir, so that is where the first traditional-retail launch begins. Accessible premium: never divided by class, never overcharging for quality. That is the whole of it — there is no third founder and no longer version.
Two hands is not many. Which is why the table matters.
The Common Table Club is the shortest line between your kitchen and the two people above — what we are testing, what is landing where, and a reply that is not a support queue.
What the standard actually is: how it is grown and graded.