What a Farmer's Son From Punjab Is Teaching Urban India About Real Food
Ekraj Singh Gill was 21 when he started Bare Naturals.
Not 21 after a prestigious MBA. Not 21 after years in the food industry. Just 21 — with a farming background, a deep frustration with how modern food production had drifted from its roots, and a clear idea of what he wanted to build.
I find this story worth telling not because young founders are automatically inspiring — they're not, always — but because of what he built and why it makes sense that someone with his specific background built it.
The Knowledge Urban India Forgot
There's a particular kind of knowledge that comes from growing up close to land and food production.
You understand, at a sensory level, what an ingredient looks like before it's been processed. You know what real mustard oil smells like because you've been around it your whole life. You can tell the difference between something genuinely natural and something that's been refined into a pale imitation of itself — not because you read a study, but because you've seen the contrast firsthand.
This is the knowledge that most urban Indian consumers — myself included — simply don't have.
We grew up with supermarkets. With packaged goods. With the comfortable assumption that bigger brands meant better products.
We had no reference point for what real looked like.
What Bare Naturals Actually Does Differently
The brand makes wood-pressed oils — extracted using traditional methods, at low temperatures, without chemical solvents.
This isn't a new idea. It's an old one. The difference is that Bare Naturals is applying it with modern accountability: traceable sourcing, transparent process, direct communication with customers about exactly how the product is made and where the raw material comes from.
That combination — ancient method plus modern transparency — is what makes it relevant to consumers who didn't grow up near a ghani and have no way of evaluating these claims through lived experience.
They're trusting the brand to be honest. The brand, to its credit, appears to have built its entire identity around deserving that trust.
Why This Kind of Brand Matters Right Now
India's food market is going through a reckoning.
A generation of consumers who were sold industrial food as progress are now questioning that narrative. They're looking for alternatives — but they're also burned by the wellness industry's tendency to slap natural on anything and charge a premium.
What they actually want is proof.
Process transparency. Traceable ingredients. Founders who can explain what they make and why, without retreating into vague marketing language.
Brands that can offer that — genuinely, not performatively — are the ones building real loyalty right now.
A 21-year-old from a farming family in Punjab, it turns out, has more credibility on this than most.
The Bigger Picture
There's something quietly significant about the direction this is moving.
The knowledge that industrial food production eroded — about traditional extraction, about ingredient integrity, about the connection between how food is made and how it affects your body — is being rebuilt. Not in laboratories. Not in boardrooms.
In small brands, founded by people close enough to the source to remember what was lost and motivated enough to bring it back.
That's not nostalgia. That's correction.
And it's coming from exactly the places you'd expect it to come from — the farms, the villages, the families that never fully let go of the old ways.
Urban India is finally starting to listen.
Know a brand doing honest work in the food or wellness space? Tell me about it in the comments — I'm always looking for the next one worth writing about.
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