The Gana Story and the Making of Vinessence

I recently met with my friend Ganapathy C B, known to friends and colleagues simply as “Gana,”.  A year ago, Gana chucked away his lawyer’s hat, rolled up his sleeves and donned an entrepreneur’s apron. Gana very kindly agreed to be interviewed for the benefit of Winnowed’s readers.

Winnowed: So, you are no longer a lawyer. I’m so tempted to ask you why you gave up law and started something else. However, before I do that, allow me to jump the gun and ask you what you are up to these days.

Gana:  Before I answer your question, please tell me, what did you have for breakfast?

Winnowed: Me? Today I had a couple of slices of bread and …

Gana: Stop! Bread? The stuff that comes in a polythene bag, which you buy from a shop?

Winnowed: Yes.  

Gana: That makes it easy for me to answer your question. I am trying to help folks like you.

Winnowed: Help people like me? How?

Gana: Have you heard of millets? Much healthier than wheat or maida, which is probably what the bread you ate today was made of. In a nutshell, I’m steering and guiding Vinessence, a start-up food-tech venture built around a simple but an increasingly urgent idea: That India needs to shift back toward millets and natural, preservative-free food which shouldn't have to come at the cost of convenience or taste.

Winnowed: Interesting. Please tell me more. What are you at Vinessence?

Gana: I am the CEO.

Winnowed: Wow! I’m impressed. Now please tell me, why did you give up your legal career? How long were you a lawyer?

Gana: 26 years as a lawyer and one fine day, I decided to do something different. You know, there is a particular kind of clarity that comes to people who have spent decades solving other people's problems — the kind that only arrives once you've seen enough boardrooms, enough deal tables, and enough disputes to know exactly where things tend to go wrong. One day, I came across Vinessence. It had been up and running for about a year or so and I liked the idea, as an investor, I mean, the way many seasoned professionals do when they encounter a business idea with genuine promise: I wrote a cheque, watched from a distance, offered counsel when asked. But something about Vinessence didn't let me stay at that distance.

Winnowed: Please go on. Please tell me more.

Gana: What I found, once I looked closely, was a founding team with real scientific depth. There was Dr. Archana Muthanna, a food technologist, together with her husband, Muthanna K. M, an HR professional, who had built the company's early product formulations out of a very personal mission: finding healthier food for their own child, and then realising that mission was one shared by households across India. What the venture didn't yet have, in full measure, was someone who had spent a career resolving the unglamorous but decisive questions that determine whether a promising product becomes a real company: governance structures, promoter alignment, regulatory strategy, networking capabilities, the discipline of running toward growth without running into the walls that undo so many food start-ups.

I recognised that decades of untangling problems for different corporates had, without me actually planning it, prepared me precisely for this. Problem-solving had always come naturally to me; what changed was the realisation that it could be turned toward building something of my own, rather than protecting someone else's enterprise. I stepped in as CEO, and Vinessence stopped being simply an investment and became my second, deliberate career.

Winnowed: Fantastic. This is amazing. Please tell me more about Vinessence.

Gana: You should take a look at our website. Why don’t you do that even as we speak. It will make my task a bit easier.

Winnowed: Good idea. (goes to https://www.vinessence.in/) You guys have a wide range of products! From what you mentioned, I was expecting a few varieties of millets and nothing more.

Gana: Let me repeat what I said at first. Eating millets does not mean you compromise on convenience and taste. I really mean it.

Winnowed: I am amazed at your product range. There are so many categories. Are all of them built around millets?

Gana: Yes, millets and other natural ingredients: we have sprouted millet pastas and noodles (foxtail, pearl millet, barnyard millet, and gluten-free variants), millet vermicelli, sprouted millet pancake mixes (banana, beetroot, carrot, chocolate) and spinach dosa mixes, millet-based spreads, fruit spreads, and natural concentrates like Garcinia Gummi-Gutta.

Winnowed: What’s Garcinia Gummi-Gutta?

Gana: That’s a nod to Kodagu's own culinary traditions. We make a vinegar known as “kachampuli” from this fruit species which is used as a souring agent in most of our cooking. It is a very good and healthy alternative to tamarind. Did I say that Vinessence is based in Kodagu? Coorg for those who may or may not have visited our part of the world.

Winnowed: Where do you source your raw materials from?

Gana: Our millets don't come from some anonymous commodity market. They come with a story attached.

Winnowed: From Kodagu?

Gana: No, Kodagu is the place to go to for coffee and spices like black pepper and cardamom, but not for millets. We source our millets predominantly from farmer associations and cooperative societies in North Karnataka. We get the stuff directly from the farmers who actually grow the grain. We avoid middlemen who've traditionally made a healthy living standing between farmers and fair prices. By cutting out the traders, we ensure that the farmers get to keep more of the value they created in the first place. So, when someone eats our millet noodles or vermicelli, there's a reasonably direct line back to a farmer in North Karnataka who got paid a fair compensation for growing the food. That's not just good ethics, it's also, quite frankly, good storytelling for a brand built on "deliciously better for you." 

Winnowed: That’s great! Ok. You are the dadas of millets. But how do you sell your products? That’s a different ball game altogether, isn’t it?

Gana: We sell directly through our own website. We also sell via major marketplaces including Amazon. WhatsApp-based direct ordering is another route.

Winnowed: I can see that your distribution approach is well suited to a young brand still building its retail footprint. What about certifications and recognitions?

Gana: Vinessence has been recognised as a food start-up by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), Ministry of Commerce & Industry, and was an incubatee at Nutrihub — the Technology Business Incubator set up by the Indian Institute of Millet Research, Hyderabad. We have also tied up with the Central Food Technological Research Institute (CFTRI). That pedigree matters in a category where scientific credibility is often the difference between a fad product and a lasting one.

Winnowed: How many employees do you have? 

Gana: Eight employees as of now and all of them are women.

Winnowed: An all-women workforce in an agri and manufacturing start-up?

Gana: That’s right. We're an eight woman powerhouse. We have six on the factory floor and 2 running the show in our corporate office, managing accounts and sales. And if you're wondering about the top of the pyramid, our senior sales and marketing team is also entirely women-led. So yes, from the shop floor to strategy, Vinessence runs on woman-power.

This wasn't a box-ticking diversity exercise, or a CSR slide we wanted to look good on. It was a deliberate bet. Manufacturing has long been coded as "a man's world" - heavy machinery, long shifts, physically demanding work, the whole macho mythology around it. We wanted to challenge that quietly, without making a big song and dance about it. Three years in, the results speak for themselves - our women haven't just matched what a male workforce might have delivered, they've outpaced it on consistency, attention to detail, and frankly almost every other aspect. Turns out the "manufacturing needs muscle" myth was mostly just habit dressed up as logic.

Winnowed: This is really amazing! Tell me, where do you see Vinessence five years from now?

Gana: In five years, I want Vinessence to become a genuine national level FMCG player. I have a five-year road map for getting there.

Winnowed: Amazing. Please break that up for me.

Gana:

•     Year 1: Establish Vinessence as India's most trusted millet brand for kids — targeting ₹5 crore in revenue, 5,000 D2C subscribers, concentrated in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Mumbai. We are preparing to kick-start this process in the next quarter.

•     Year 2: Build national presence across 10-plus cities through quick commerce, specialty retail and cafes alongside a dedicated packaging launch. We will target ₹10 crore in revenue and 18,000 subscribers.

•     Year 3: Open export markets in the UAE, Singapore, and the UK's Indian diaspora communities — targeting ₹20 crore in revenue, 45,000 subscribers, and Series A readiness.

•     Year 5: Reach a ₹75-100 crore brand with pan-India modern trade presence and genuine international reach — a scale at which the company would expect to draw acquisition interest from major FMCG players, or alternatively raise a Series B to compete with them directly.

Winnowed: You guys are really focussed!

Gana: My ambition for Vinessence goes well beyond running a healthy-snacks label. This ambition now has real infrastructure behind it. Vinessence has established its own manufacturing unit, currently operating at a production capacity of 4 to 5 tonnes per month — a meaningful step up from outsourced or contract manufacturing, giving the company direct control over quality, formulation, and cost as it scales.

Winnowed: How is Vinessence funded?

Gana: To fund the current phase, Vinessence has closed its first round of funding from friends and family, at a valuation of ₹15 crore. It's a deliberately structured first step: rather than chasing headline growth before the fundamentals are proven, the company is using this capital specifically to sharpen its go-to-market execution, building out marketing and sales capability, strengthening distribution, and pursuing an ambitious revenue target over the coming year.

The logic of the roadmap is straightforward and disciplined, very much in keeping with the careful, risk-aware thinking that I bring from my legal and corporate background: prove the commercial model first. Once the upcoming year's revenue targets are met, Vinessence will expand its manufacturing capability to roughly triple its current scale, moving from 4-5 tonnes a month toward a production base capable of serving national retail and modern trade in a much bigger way. It's a sequencing that reflects my instinct, honed over decades of watching companies succeed and fail: growth capital deployed after commercial proof, not before it and also selecting the right people for specific roles in the company – “horses for courses” as the saying goes!

Winnowed: Tell me Gana, do you think you are getting your timing right?

Gana: I absolutely am! India's D2C market is projected to reach roughly ₹8.5 trillion by 2025, supporting 800-plus active brands, while the country's health and wellness food market — valued at $14.25 billion in 2025 — is projected to more than double to $30.62 billion by 2033. Health-oriented food orders grew 2.3 times faster than the overall food category in 2025 alone, and India's shift toward preventive nutrition has moved firmly into the mainstream since the pandemic.

Several structural tailwinds sit behind this shift: India is on track to become the world's third-largest consumer market by 2026, with its affluent population (earning above $10,000 a year) expected to more than double from 40 million in 2023 to 88 million by 2028; smartphone and quick-commerce penetration now put clean-label, health-first D2C brands within reach of Tier-2 cities without a single physical store; and India's own millet production grew 12% year-on-year in 2025, with government policy (the “Shree Anna” push) and moves by major players creating category awareness that lifts every millet brand riding the wave. Against a backdrop of 101 million diabetics — the largest such population in the world — and India's 8.2% GDP growth in FY25, the fastest among major economies, the case for a credible, well-manufactured millet-and-natural-foods brand has rarely been stronger.

Winnowed: Do you guys have a punchy tag-line?

Gana: You bet, we do. “Deliciously Better for You”. How does it sound?

Winnowed: It’s absolutely “millet-ant” for your course!  Let me ask you something personal?  What’s your typical day like?

Gana:  Since the time I decided to take this plunge, I aimed at moving into a different regime which I guess many promoters recognise – equal parts chaos and choreography. I split my time between Vinessence’s ever growing to-do list and my family. The one non-negotiable perk in between corporate calls and deadlines, I get to step out into crisp clean air, green hills and chirping birds instead of traffic horns. I like to say, I have swapped a corner office for a corner of the western ghats – best of both worlds, corporate mission by day and misty mountains as my backdrop!   

Winnowed: When you were a lawyer, what was your typical day like?

Gana:  I would suggest you don’t even go there…”corporate slavery” is the affectionate term I use, and I don’t say it lightly. If you had to be a successful General Counsel in an MNC, you don’t recognise clocks, time zones or the concept of after hours. You slog it through, regardless of whether the sun is up or everyone else has gone to sleep. Twenty-six years of that will either break you or teach you resilience – I would like to think I came out the other side with the latter.