I work at The Whole Truth Foods, a packaged food company, and the whole truth is that you don't actually need packaged food. Not even the stuff we make and sell. In an ideal world, none of this needs to exist—not our protein bars, not our chocolate, not our whey. You'd make everything at home. Fresh food.
So why do we exist? And why do I, someone who believes this, show up to work every day building a packaged food company?
Here's how I think about the purpose of our work—why we do what we do.
1. We make protein bars. But you don't need them. You need nutritious snacks.
I have the TWT protein bar almost every day. Sometimes half before my 8:30am workout, sometimes at 11am when I've skipped breakfast, sometimes at 4pm for that energy slump. And always one in my bag when I travel.
But none of this is needed. I could have a banana before workouts, or veggies and hummus in the evening, or sprouts with vegetables, or home-made trail mix for flights.
And yet, I choose our Rs 90 bar every day. Why? Because first, I genuinely love it—it's yum!—food must bring joy. But also because it solves for convenience in a life where I've chosen not to spend Sunday afternoons meal-prepping.
And in the absence of that—and because weekdays are rushed—gaps appear in my everyday nutrition. These gaps need solutions, and that's where packaged food helps.
Now I could restructure my life to avoid packaged food entirely, but I've consciously chosen convenience. It's a trade-off. I outsource this need to a TWT bar—one with ingredients so good and so clean that my body loves it. Because I won't feed my body junk in the name of convenience. That's where I draw the line.
Because the real problem with packaged food isn’t that it comes out of a packet—it’s that most of it is made of things that don’t deserve to be called "food". They often have long, synthetic ingredient lists that mimic food but aren’t food.
At The Whole Truth, we fundamentally solve for it with the simplest food philosophy there is: good food is made of good ingredients, and good ingredients aren’t made in a chemistry lab. That’s it.
In short, you lose nothing in your life if you don't eat our bar. I don't even want to sell it to you if you don't need us. But if you've made trade-offs in your life that lead you to packaged food, we promise to make the cleanest and tastiest thing you can have.
And if you see that value, you will pay for it. That payment is the signal—to us and the market—that this is real value creation. Which incentivises us to do more of this in other categories. And that's how the self-serving logic of capitalism works.
2. We make whey protein powder. But you don't need whey. You need protein.
Depending on your body and needs, you need anywhere from 0.8g protein per kg of body weight to 2g/kg. (If you're 70kg and moderately active, that's 56-140g daily.)
As a vegetarian, when I do my protein math, I can see how to hit my targets without whey—though it is really hard. It's hardest when I'm trying to consciously add muscle, but for maintenance phases, it's still doable.
In a world where I had an insanely good cook who could make me food exactly how I want it, with the right portions and macros, I could hit my protein goals every day without whey. But I don't have that luxury.
Now I could become that cook myself—spend an hour each day planning and preparing perfectly portioned meals. Or I could hire someone for that. But I've chosen not to. (Actually, I tried finding someone, and failed.) So again, trade-off.
This is where whey comes in—to fill the protein gap created by that trade-off. And no, I'm not being lazy: I eat protein in almost every meal, and yet there's a gap that persists despite conscious effort.
For the longest time, I had a conflicted relationship with whey. Something I thought I needed but never felt entirely comfortable with.
The problem is that I don't trust most supplement companies. Packaged food is already a low-trust category—supplements are even worse.
The incentives are broken: mix whey with cheaper ingredients, keep the price the same, and suddenly your margins jump. For a product that costs in thousands, that's a significant cut on every unit.
TWT solves this at the root. We source the highest-quality whey (strict procurement), make the cleanest version possible (no thickeners and anti-caking agents and so on), manufacture it in the safest facility, subject it to rigorous quality checks—and now, to win people's trust, talk about how we do things and what we are learning about the industry.
So if you, like me, have made the trade-off that leads you to whey, our powder is our attempt to bring you the best. And give you all the information you need to make an informed choice.
Now look, if you're perfectly fine with artificial sweeteners, caking agents, or synthetic red-velvet flavours in your daily shake, please buy our competitors. I know folks who've made that conscious choice, and for their context, our competitors actually offer better value.
But if you, like me, value real-food ingredients, come to us.
3. We make date-sweetened dark chocolate. But you don't need it. You need a delicious sweet treat.
Our chocolate is my favourite product of everything we make. I'm so proud of it. I have three squares every day—often after dinner, or one small square with my coffee—because it's one of the sources of sweet joy I look forward to.
At the risk of repetition, you do not need chocolate (and hope you can see my existential need to differentiate between needs and wants.)
You could have fruit after dinner, or make ice-creams at home, or simply skip dessert. But I love 70%+ dark chocolate, especially that balance of bitterness and sweetness that only real chocolate made with real cocoa gives you.
The problem is it's just hard to find real cocoa in most chocolates. The chocolates you often get are mostly just chocolate "flavour" or chocolate compound. They don't have actual cocoa. Many replace cocoa butter with palm oil, then add Polyglycerol Polyricinoleate to make the chocolate flow—which it can't because of that replacement.
So much of packaged food is just adding one more ingredient to mask the problem a previous ingredient created, and then you go on, until you don't know when what was supposed to be a simple food—cocoa and a sweetener, in case of chocolate—becomes something else entirely.
Now I refuse to accept that our only choices are this junk or home-made dessert. There is space for clean, indulgent packaged desserts—real chocolate that actually tastes good. So we make ours with just two ingredients: cocoa and dates... and nothing else.
And oh, dates. That's an intentional choice. Not the health-washing bullshit—like "Protein Water" (I can't even!) or "No Added Sugar" everything. Dates have a significantly better nutritional profile than refined sugar and a much better metabolic response. So we chose it.
What most of our consumers don't know is the mad effort making this takes: conching machines that run 10x longer to smoothen the mix and a cold-chain to keep it stable till it reaches your home.
I don't think we have done a good job of showing the pain this takes—we should, and I will—but the point is, purpose takes pain. And you take pain only when the purpose is genuinely felt, not manufactured for the heck of it.
So yes, there’s a world in which TWT shouldn’t exist—a world where everyone has the time, resources, and inclination to make whole food from scratch. Or everyone has access to a neighbourhood shop that fills for the gaps you can't at home.
But we don’t live in that world. Most of us have made trade-offs that mean we won’t. And so TWT has a right to exist and do the right thing. And that gives me meaning when I show up to work every day.
And there’s no virtue here. You don’t need the top leadership at TWT to be righteous for this to work. Humans are fallible. What keeps us honest isn’t moral purity. It’s simply the market.
Because honesty is good for business. We have six years of data to prove it. The moment we stop being honest (we won’t), trust will erode, the brand will decay, and the whole thing will collapse.
So we give you all the information you need to decide whether you even need us. That’s what built trust from day zero—and that trust, in turn, built the business.
The tricky bit—and the underappreciated one—is that this commitment means letting go of some consumers who don’t align. Who look at our bar and say: “Gosh, this bar has 250 calories, that’s too much for 12g protein, so I’m not having it.” Every time someone tells me that, I say: totally cool. I really love it when consumers make such conscious choices about what they eat.
Same with dates and sugar. If you’re someone who thinks dates are no better than refined sugar, my first urge is to share the facts and explain why we made this choice. But if you have a different interpretation or a way to look at things, that’s fine too—my job is to give you the information to make a choice, even if that means you walk away.
And that’s my barometer of transparency for TWT: are we offering enough information for some people to consciously reject us? If not, we’re not building a truly transparent brand—we are just spitting shallow words to "perform" transparency. And performance doesn’t build a generational brand.
What I’ve learnt building TWT is that when you treat consumers with genuine care and respect for their agency, it shows. And when you don’t, that shows too. Because eventually, at some point in the chain, the facade will crack. Then scale will amplify the chaos, and all the wow-ness will decay into business death.
The logic of capitalism has rewarded our honesty. We have to stay with it for that logic to survive. Not for the virtuous selves of any individual leaders.
Now I say this with full awareness that most consumers aren’t thinking deeply about their needs (how I wish they would). Often, they look for trusted brands as cognitive shortcuts—because life can get hard, and they’re busy, with no bandwidth to make every small decision with rigour. So they place trust in us to do the right thing.
That’s where responsibility towards consumers stops being just a business choice and becomes a matter of values. And that sense of responsibility is the soul partner of the capitalistic logic that makes this magic work.
The more I understand how simple TWT’s fundamentals are, the more I feel one of our primary jobs is to keep drilling this idea into every corner of the org—to repeat in every room, again and again, what our why is, how we think about food, and the hard trade-offs consumers make to buy from us. And never take it for granted.