We started because
the shelf kept
getting worse.

For a long time, buying jaggery in Kerala meant taking a chance. Two blocks side by side on the same shelf, the same price, and no way to tell which one had been boiled honestly.

The bright, even, golden ones sold fastest. They usually still do. What most people are never told is that the colour is often the least honest thing about them — lifted with caramel, cleaned up with sulphur, set firm with additives that have nothing to do with sugarcane. Somewhere along the way, the sweetener our grandmothers trusted became something you had to be suspicious of.

Chembakam Foods began at Embate, in Pariyaram, with a small unit, an open pan and a decision to make jaggery the way it was made before anyone thought to improve it. A wood fire, a long boil, and a ladle that lifts the scum off by hand — because that is the only method that does not involve adding a chemical.

It is slower. It yields less. The blocks are not identical, and a batch boiled in December does not look like one boiled in April. We have made peace with all of it, because the alternative is putting something in your kitchen that we would not put in ours.