In October 2019, a team of four people working with two tables, two blenders and an oven out of a 1,000 sq. ft unit in Andheri East, Mumbai, packed and shipped the first orders for a new food brand. The operation, with a newly built website, produced a protein bar available in three flavours.
There were no stores, no advertising campaigns and a few existing customers who came from a blog.
For Shashank Mehta, the founder of what would become The Whole Truth (TWT), the launch was the culmination of a set of questions he had been asking for years—first as a consumer, then as a marketer and eventually as an entrepreneur.
“This is such a mission-oriented company,” says Mehta, 40, “and my own identity is mixed up with the company. Because it really feels like my entire life was leading up to the moment when I started the company.”
How The Whole Truth Began
TWT, with its 500-plus staff, and six products—protein bars, muesli, peanut butters, dark chocolates, protein powders and a range for children—calls itself India’s first 100% clean label food brand. Mehta says they are currently operating at an annual revenue of around ₹650 crore and expects that figure to approach ₹800 crore this year.
About 90% of their sales come through online channels, including quick-commerce platforms and e-commerce marketplaces. The rest comes from roughly 3,000 retail outlets.
At a café in Mumbai’s Bandra Kurla Complex, Mehta wonders whether he should have a coffee—given his controlled diet. He decides to postpone the decision—and eventually chooses not to have anything. Dressed in a T-shirt with the words, “Say no to drugs sugar”, he is an animated speaker, a curious listener and—as I find out later—passionate researcher.
Having grown up in Delhi as the son of a math teacher mother and a father who worked at ONGC his entire career, Mehta describes himself as “always a fat kid”. By the time he completed Class XII from a boys-only school, he weighed around 110kg.
When he joined engineering at the Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University in Delhi, he decided to lose weight. He was in a co-ed for the first time and thought that he didn’t get enough attention from women. “I thought it’s because of the way I looked. So, I just stopped eating and started running. There was no science behind it.”
He lost around 40kg in less than a year. He equated being thin with being fit, so he started eating and drinking like his thin friends. In three years, 30kg came back; by the end of engineering, he was again at around 100kg.
At the Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow, he repeated the cycle. The pattern bothered him but career concerns triumphed, taking him to a marketing job at Hindustan Unilever Ltd in Mumbai in 2009. His parents were understandably thrilled as Mehta’s “first salary was higher than my father’s last salary”.
The expectation was straightforward: build a career, stay with a large company and progress steadily. But Mehta drew happiness from creation, which he brackets into two categories. “You can either become an individual creator, which is a comedian, actor, artist of some form. Or you can become an institutional creator, which is called an entrepreneur.”
In 2012, he left Unilever to join a food start-up, Rebel Foods (which has the Faasos brand), as an entrepreneur-in-residence . The “operationally intense” experience lasted two years because running restaurants turned out to be different from building marketing campaigns. “You are on the floor for 16 hours a day,” says Mehta.
By the time he returned to Unilever, he had regained weight and was questioning some of his assumptions about discipline, health and work. The third attempt at weight loss proved different.
He spent months reading nutrition research, books on food and scientific papers. He taught himself how to read labels, understand ingredient lists and evaluate nutritional claims. The weight came off. More significantly, it stayed off.
“I knew that I am doing it in a structural manner. That I will remain off forever. From (age) 26 till today, 40, it’s never come back,” says the father of a two-and-a-half-year-old.
Around 2014-15, he published articles in a blog, Fitshit, examining packaged foods, nutrition claims and ingredient lists, some short and social media friendly, others over 1,500 words long. The response was encouraging, with people interested in not just nutrition but trust in what they were buying.
Consumers felt that they were discovering aspects about products years after they had started eating them. The problem, Mehta believes, was not that food companies were lying. “They don’t lie. If they lie, they go to jail. They speak half-truths,” he says, about terms such as “high protein”, “low fat” or “diabetic friendly”.
“I love (the phrase) diabetic friendly,” he says. “What does the cookie do? Does it come out of the packet and hug a diabetic? What does diabetic-friendly mean? Nothing, and you can’t take me to court for it.”
He realised he was doing the same thing in his previous job, selling shampoos and creams with the promises of getting rid of dandruff in three weeks or fairer skin in four. “The tricks were the same. But in food it hurts more because it goes inside your body,” Mehta says.
Around 2017, he began experimenting with a protein bar at home, trying to make it with a short ingredient list and without the additives commonly found in packaged foods. He eventually arrived at a version that held together and tasted good enough for colleagues to try.
With the blog too gaining momentum, he felt he had to put words into action or shut up about it. The encouraging feedback led to Mehta thinking about a food company built around a different premise, not to have ingredients hidden on the back of a package while marketing claims occupied the front. The company name, naturally, became Fitshit Health Solutions.
Years at Unilever had taught him that durable brands are often built on a simple insight. For The Whole Truth, that insight was, “No one likes being lied to”.
Sauce.vc, whose founder Manu Chandra had been reading the blog, came in as investor along with former colleagues from Unilever. Mehta was introduced to Rachna Aggarwal, a pastry chef and chocolatier, who ran a training studio. Initially she helped him improve the recipes; later she agreed to join as co-founder.
The duo worked on making the products commercially viable, giving them a shelf life without the use of preservatives, while Mehta served out his notice period at Unilever as marketing manager. When TWT finally launched in October 2019, the company had one product category.
How The Whole Truth Works
TWT solved the aspect of taste—sweetening without refined sugar—with dates, which added a caramel-like sweetness and could be binding. They eliminated the need for preservatives by removing moisture from the consumables—using a lot of dry fruits—and nitrogen-flushing their packaging.
“We call ourselves a truth brand. We’re not a healthy food brand. We’re not a protein brand. We’re not a snacking brand. We are clear that as long as we can keep holding your trust by never telling you a half-truth, our consumers show that they will buy any product from us,” he adds. Whatever ingredients they use, they declare it prominently.
TWT broadly competes with brands like Yoga Bar, Slurrp Farm, True Elements among others. “But our product,” Mehta says with a pause, “we call it scaling artisanal. That we’re trying to scale your mom’s kitchen. We’re not changing the process.”
Today, it operates its own facilities in Mumbai which, according to Mehta, was driven by necessity because early contract manufacturers were unwilling to produce bars using the formulations he wanted.
He explains that the means of making their products—initially in his kitchen to now in a facility—has not changed much. Today, about 500 women come in every day to hand-press the bars. “The process is: take five ingredients, put it in the mixer. It becomes a goop. Take that goop out. Make it into balls of 50g each. There’s a mould which is the shape of the bar. Put the goop in that. Press. You get the bar. Sprinkle almonds on top. Press. Your bar is done.”
Mehta spends less time now working on products and more time on operations and hirings while Aggarwal focuses on product development. He also remains the company’s primary brand ambassador, filling its website and social media with vlogs and other commentary on food.
But claims of being “truthful” has also come with scrutiny. Earlier this year, TWT revised some packaging vocabulary on its chocolate products after regulatory discussions around claims relating to sugar content. The formulation remained unchanged, he says, but wording on the packaging was altered.
“If you see our chocolate packaging, 50% of the front of pack says this chocolate is made of 71% cocoa, 29% dates. At the base, there is a small thing that says no added sugar, which is now changed to sweetened with dates.”
The company’s next target is an IPO within the next three-four years but before that there will be opportunities across multiple food categories. TWT has already begun testing freshly made protein shakes through cloud kitchens in Mumbai, a move that takes it beyond only packaged products.
“Many companies are able to build one or two great products,” Mehta says. “Few are able to build an organisation with all the capabilities needed—like finance, supply, production etc.—coming together and humming every day.”
Arun Janardhan (@iArunJ) is a Mumbai-based journalist who covers sports, business leaders and lifestyle.