We were lucky to catch up with Ketan Vakil recently and have shared our conversation below.

Ketan, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

I’ve had stomach problems since I was a teenager. I had lots of tests and tried various medicines to try to improve the situation but nothing worked. Seemingly random foods would make me feel sick. I saw a lot of doctors who chalked it up to stress or nebulous IBS without any solutions. 15 years later, I stumbled on some research about “FODMAPs” that are simple sugars naturally present in lots of fruits, vegetables and grains. I asked a hospital here in NYC to give me a test for 3 of these sugars and immediately that showed this was my problem. Changing how I ate would clearly solve the issue from what the data showed. And it did! After tons of unnecessary drugs, tests and even colonoscopies, I came to discover that food – specifically the high levels of FODMAPs in much of what we eat – was the reason for my symptoms. I had to start eating a low FODMAP diet.

The problem is that this diet cuts out a lot of flavorful ingredients and the hardest two were garlic and onion bulbs. Obviously, they are in everything. However, I was fortunate to live in NYC where we have some of the best farmers markets in the country and learned that certain plants tasted really similar but were much lower in FODMAPs. Things like garlic scapes, the green parts of certain scallion species, garlic chives, ramp leaves and other fun ingredients. I started freezing some of these speciality ingredients to have them year round and make my own broths from them too – broths are so central to a lot of dishes and they are all made with allium bulbs.

During this, I came to learn gut health is a major challenge across the world. 2 out of 3 people experience digestive symptoms at least weekly, almost a billion people have irritable bowel syndrome and stomach problems are the #1 cause of ER visits for women (#4 for men). So, I certainly wasn’t alone and the ingredients I’d found and the recipes I’d made using them would help a lot of people. I sat on that notion for a long time but a couple years later decided I would regret not trying to bring these my solutions to the world. I wanted everyone to be able to enjoy gourmet taste without digestive distress so they could savor the joy of flavorful living without compromise like I was now doing. Some others had taken a stab at solutions but no one was doing it in a way I thought was good for whole body health — through using real ingredients, not lab-created flavors and fillers.

So, I was most excited that I could help people like me AND that I could combine this with my passion for cooking (and of course eating) great foods!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

My background is in technology and marketing, not in food (besides loving to cook and explore restaurants). But once I found out there were millions of people out there like me having to compromise having great flavor, or live with stomach symptoms all the time, I knew something had to be done.

Can you tell us about your products and what you are most proud of?

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

We do not self manufacture for a couple of reasons… first, it would be impossible to make our shelf stable broths on our own (we felt it was important to be shelf stable, not to be shipping frozen products all around the country). This requires very specialized equipment that no small brand could buy on their own. Secondly, manufacturing is almost like running a 2nd business. We want to focus on development the best product, getting the world out and servicing our community to the best of our ability.

At the start, I only had 10% of the knowledge re: how our products could be made at scale. It took over a year to find partners who were willing to take a chance on a small company who wanted to make things in a very specialized way. A couple examples: almost all broths are made with off the shelf inputs. Drop some frozen onions and other vegetable and/or chicken powder in hot water, mix, and package. We had to find a team willing to bring in fresh scallions and onions and literally hand cut just the green parts (the gentler parts) for our recipe. Those get combined with other fresh vegetables and bones and simmer all night. Most manufacturers don’t want to do it this way. Similarly, we had to find farms willing to grow specialty produce for us (i.e. garlic chives or negi scallions) and another partner to cut, dehydrate and powder them the way we need. These ingredients are not simply available on the open market like simple onion and garlic powder. We had to invent the entire supply chain to make our products happen.

The main lesson is that it’s hard, there’s always surprises (like leaking broths pouches in a first year!), forecasting demand and not making too much (or too little)…. and we are always learning something new or solving a surprise challenge.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.gourmendfoods.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gourmendfoods/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GourmendFoods/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gourmend/

Image Credits
Jayna Kropas and Joshua Swain