Why I started Chau Foods, what I got wrong, what took longer than I thought, and what I would do the same way again.
- Mohit Arora, Founder
Delhi • Rohini
I started Chau Foods because I could not find the quality of dry fruits I wanted for my own family. That is still the standard I use for every batch.
The Story So Far
I grew up in a family that has been part of the dry fruits and food trade in Delhi for a long time. Long before I understood price lists or profit margins, I understood the difference between a good almond and a bad one. I learned how to tell a fresh batch of makhana from a stale one just by the way it sounded when you shook the pack. Quality was never a marketing word in our house - it was just how you were expected to work.
Years later, a health scare in the family changed how I looked at dry fruits. My father was diagnosed with a condition where what he ate mattered every single day. Dry fruits were now not a snack - they were medicine. I went out to buy the same premium anjeer and almonds we had trusted for years, and I came back frustrated. Even at expensive stores, batches were inconsistent - dry, over-treated, sometimes clearly adulterated. If this was what people were paying premium prices for, something was very wrong.
That is really where Chau Foods started. Not with a business plan, but with a decision - if I could not find the quality I wanted for my own family, I would build it from scratch. We went straight to the source. Bihar for makhana, where 90% of the world's supply comes from. Afghanistan for premium anjeer. California for almonds. Iran for Akbari pistachios. We spent months meeting farmers, tasting batches, arguing about grades. We picked partners we would still call today, not because the price was right, but because the quality was.
For a long time, it felt like we were building for ourselves. The first orders came from friends and family. Then their friends. Then people we had never met, from cities I had never been to. Somewhere along the way, we crossed our first 1,000 customers. That number meant a lot. It meant that a lot of Indian households were also tired of paying premium prices for average dry fruits. It meant we were on the right track. Today we serve over 2,000 families across India, plus wholesale buyers, cafes, hotels, and corporate gifting clients - and it still feels like the beginning.
We are FSSAI, APEDA, and IEC certified. We source directly from farms and small producers. We ship across India and to 20+ countries. We do not use middlemen for our best products. We do not sell anything we would not eat ourselves. We answer every message. We taste every new batch. We are still a small team - and that is deliberate. Some things do not scale well, and quality is one of them.
What I Believe
The best packaging in the world cannot fix a bad batch. So we start where the food starts - the farm.
A small team that tastes every batch is worth more than a big company that ships from a warehouse.
Fair prices to the farmers who grow our food. Fair prices to the families who eat it. Everything else is noise.
Where the makhana was harvested. Which orchard the almonds came from. What FSSAI lab tested this batch. If you have nothing to hide, hide nothing.
Looking Forward
We are building Chau Foods into the most trusted premium dry fruits brand in India. That means more direct farm partnerships, more Health Combos designed for real problems Indian families deal with every day, more transparency about where every batch comes from, and - most of all - never giving up the standard that a founder is willing to feed his own family from every bag.
If you are a farmer, a founder, a journalist, a nutritionist, a retailer, or someone who just cares about better food - I would love to hear from you.
Have a question, a story, or an idea? Reach out. I read every message that comes in.
A-3/318-319, Unity Enclave, Sector-28, Rohini • New Delhi 110042 • +91 95990 21447