Raj Seelam is one of the Bhishma Pitamahas (read as pioneering doyen) of the organic food retail movement in India.
A serial entrepreneur whose journey spans three very different ventures—a dotcom-era CRM startup, a high-security number plate manufacturing business, and then 24 Mantra Organic—India's pioneering organic food brand. He is also the founder of the Association of Indian Organic (AIOI) Industry which aims to work towards building a USD 10 billion Indian Organic Industry by 2030.
Since there were a lot of chatter post the ITC acquisition of 24 Mantra Organic, I decided to side-step that narrow sliver and document his entrepreneurial journey, warts and all, especially for the second and third-generation organic food entrepreneurs.
This is a deeply personal conversation.
Raj's entrepreneurial convictions weren't born in a business school classroom or a VC pitch meeting. They were seeded watching women farm workers sing folk songs during rice transplanting in his village near Nagarjuna Sagar, sharpened by witnessing farmer suicides in the early 1990s while selling fertilizers at EID Parry, and hardened by his father's cancer diagnosis in 1999.
Raj Seelam is a man who doesn’t mince words and he dropped some powerful truth bombs that stir the status quo’s hornet nest. He also provided a lot of refreshing clarity on some of the vexing problems that afflicts the organic food ecosystem in India. I hope you enjoy the conversation.
Although I hate takeaways, here is an edited takeaway from the conversation for those who don’t have the patience to go into the greyness and nuance we explored in the conversation. Always remember: The Map is not the Territory.
Venky Ramachandran: Raj, if we could start from the very beginning—your village, your childhood, your first brush with farming.
Raj Seelam: My village is about 100 kilometres from Hyderabad, on the way to Nagarjuna Sagar. We don’t get water from Nagarjuna Sagar other than for drinking in the recent past. We come from a drought-prone area—average rainfall of about 530mm, and we hardly get two rainfalls post-monsoons. Life is tough.
We grew up in Hyderabad for education, but we’d always go back to the village during holidays. We actually looked forward to it. There’s where the fun was, with family, with grandparents.
My fondest memories are of summer holidays when harvesting would happen. My father would make sure we went to the field, supervised the harvesting. It was very labor-intensive those days. I’d go in the morning, get lunch to the farm, and be there till 6, 6:30 in the evening. And transplanting—my memories are of all these women workers singing folk songs. That was fun. And of course, no water bottles—you’d drink directly from the well.
Dusshera would always coincide with the harvesting of dryland crops—that’s why it’s more popular in Telangana. People have some money, or expect some money shortly. Sankranti was more a coastal Andhra festival, because of irrigated agriculture. Telangana was rain-fed, not much money, but whatever little people had, they’d always buy new clothes.
Venky Ramachandran: You never had the early inkling that you’d work in the agriculture sector?
Raj Seelam: My father always encouraged us to move away from farming, saying it’s very difficult to have a good standard of living. We weren’t small farmers—from our context, we were reasonably well-off. But you still couldn’t afford any of the luxuries a city offers. Every good meal a day, a nice house to sleep in—that’s it. Not much savings.
But I was still very much interested in agriculture. I did my graduation in agriculture, then went to IIM Ahmedabad for an MBA. There, I chose the agribusiness specialization. About 25 of us were in it, and except 2 or 3, everyone took up other jobs. I was one of the very few who stuck to agriculture.
Venky Ramachandran: And then from campus, you joined EID Parry?
Raj Seelam: That was a bit of an odd choice. It was the lowest-paying salary—no one wanted to join, given the pay. But I read this article in Business India about a 200-year-old company on the verge of collapse that turned around. I’d done my summer training with some multinationals, and I didn’t find it exciting—everything is set, there’s nothing much for you to do other than follow a set process.
I said, this must be fun. That was my first and last job—from 1988 to 2000. Fertiliser, pesticide, and seeds. My last assignment was with the seeds business, where we converted our seed business into a joint venture with Monsanto.
Venky Ramachandran: Being in the agri-input industry and then developing a conviction for organic—that’s an unusual transition. People in agri-input companies typically dismiss organic as a fad.
Raj Seelam: There were what I call moments of truth. The first was in the early 1990s, working with farmers. Farmer suicides had started happening. They’d borrow money for fertilizer, not be able to repay. A farmer might have a good season once in four years, average once in four years, and two bad years. When you have a good season, prices aren’t there. Borrowing money for fertilizer and pesticides makes it worse. And the practices of agri companies aren’t great—they just want to sell at any cost, not really provide solutions.
Coming from a farming family and a certain value system, I said I should do something about it whenever I get the chance.
The second moment was practically seeing pesticide being used—farmers dipping produce in pesticide before sending it to market because people didn’t want insects. That’s when I stopped eating a lot of things—cabbage, cauliflower, quite a few things. That’s when I made my first note: I should do something about this.
The third nail was my father’s cancer diagnosis in 1999. When I was researching treatment options, I realized the incidence of cancer had gone up quite high—better detection, yes, but also food, lifestyle, pollution.
And fourth—my father would use half the dose of fertilizer, grow greens, hardly use one round of pesticide, and still get the best yield in a 100–150 kilometre radius. That convinced me that doing away with fertilizer and pesticides is definitely possible.
Venky Ramachandran: Take us through the entrepreneurial ventures before 24 Mantra Organic.
Raj Seelam: My first venture was iwantareply.com—a third-party customer portal with a few friends. We developed the portal, then the dotcom bust happened. No one was willing to fund us. We pivoted to CRM software, implemented it for a Dubai radio channel. Then 9/11 happened—we never got paid. We tried consulting, then realised knowledge doesn’t pay. People take your ideas but don’t pay for it.
Then this thing about high-security number plates came up. We tied up with a German partner. One competitor had tried to trademark the Ashoka emblem—we brought it to the government’s notice, they cleaned it up. We bid in 15 states, set up the factory. I had no knowledge about engineering, but we were the first company to get all approvals from the Automotive Research Association of India.
But these were government projects, and at some point, you have to compromise. Payoffs and other things—my value system didn’t agree with it. I convinced my partners and we sold the business. We were the only guys who made money in that business. That was in 2003.
Venky Ramachandran: And the organic idea had been simmering since 1992.
Raj Seelam: It was always at the back of my mind. When I exited, that was the first time I had my money—because my entrepreneurial journey started with about 1.5 lakh rupees, my gratuity savings from Parry. That went off in the first business. Second business, we managed somehow.
One thing I learned: learning is continuous, you don’t have to get stuck in one field. I’d gone from agri-inputs to software to light engineering. So I had this money, and I was exploring options, but organic was always pulling me.
All my research told me I’d be a fool to start anything connected with organic. No one knew what organic was, and apparently no one cared. But I had this gut feeling—incomes were increasing, people were looking for healthier options. We might be a little early, but not too early.
One of the learnings from my first business: staying power. If you’re too early and the market takes time to mature, and you don’t have the money, you lose out.
And I learned from watching Monsanto—pioneers don’t always succeed or make money. They might create impact, but a lot of missteps and a little arrogance can undo them. I didn’t want to be another dinosaur.
That’s why I didn’t want partners. I knew it was a long shot. I didn’t want anyone to lose their money. Let me begin with my own thing—whatever I earned, I reinvest it back. We incorporated the company in March 2004.
Venky Ramachandran: What was the initial market hypothesis?
Raj Seelam: I spent about a year going around—meeting pioneering farmers like Nammalvar, visiting farms in Gujarat, going abroad, visiting small organic stores in Chennai and Bombay.
Two fundamental realisations emerged. First, availability has to be continuous—otherwise, why would a customer switch? Second, people wanted to know that if they choose to switch, they can fully switch or substantially switch. So having a wide range of products became important.
From the farmer side, it made sense too—a farmer produces multiple things. If you say you’ll only buy one thing, why would they do organic for you?
From day one, we had about 120-130 products from farmers already growing organic.
My goals were threefold, very clear, written down as my vision statement before starting the company: create better livelihoods for farmers, ensure pure and unadulterated food, and do a little bit for the ecology.
Now, one challenge with organic is that pesticides—you can’t see them, can’t feel them. You can’t get any immediate benefit from consuming organic. People have to consume for a long time before they realise the difference. So we focused on culinary experience—taste, bite, mouthfeel, aroma.
We realised that a lot of newer varieties give good yield but from a sensory experience, they’re not great. So we went back, identified old varieties. In many cases, we had to find retired breeders, get seed from them, multiply, and give it back to farmers.
That created stickiness. I’ll give one example—we were one of the first companies to do brown rice. Customers came from us, then supermarkets started offering cheaper brown rice. For a couple of months, we lost those customers. Then they started coming back, saying: “We tried, but this is something different. The taste is not the same, the cooking is not the same.”
Venky Ramachandran: Working capital has been a perennial challenge. Most of your capital went into managing inventory rather than into losses.
Raj Seelam: That’s right. We had to buy everything, stock for the entire year, and sell as and when. Most investors don’t want to invest in ventures where working capital is very high—it affects your free cash flows.
Today the system is more mature. We work with companies like Star Agri for storing material. We experimented with warehouse receipt systems—that worked well, but RBI intervened because of fraud elsewhere and restricted banks from doing it.
One interesting thing we tried: some farmers said they didn’t want money immediately. They wanted it over a period of time at a higher price, and we worked that out.
For new organic entrepreneurs, my advice: if you’re profitable, raising working capital from banks is easier. If not, you’re pushed to NBFCs at 17-18% interest, which doesn’t work. So develop products where the raw material cost is a smaller percentage. And build profitability first.
Venky Ramachandran: We now have second-generation organic players like Two Brothers Organic who’ve raised venture capital and are putting out plans to reach 1000 crore.
Raj Seelam: Today, if you look at Two Brothers, most of their products are not organic. They give an impression of organic, but they’re not really organic. So obviously they don’t need to have this kind of working capital pressure. That’s the ecosystem challenge—the certification system seems broken.
Venky Ramachandran: Amul has democratized the organic space with significantly lower prices. How do you see that?
Raj Seelam: Amul cuts marketing costs through sheer distribution power. They source mostly from intermediaries—not direct farming. And they’re not looking at making money from this right now, perhaps even in the future, given government pressure.
That puts private entrepreneurs at a disadvantage—they need ROI for investors. But if price were the only factor, everyone should have disappeared by now. Amul has been in the market 5-6 years. Obviously they’re facing sourcing challenges too—they can’t get enough quantities. Unless you invest in farmers and farming, this is not scalable. Today the game is more about a document and a test report.
Venky Ramachandran: The organic certification system has become incredibly complex. Process-based certification is the premise, but it’s been taken for a ride. If you had a whiteboard to reimagine this from first principles, what would you do?
Raj Seelam: Today, if I restart, I would not even get into certification. I would set up my own process—whether it’s a testing system or whatever. In first principles terms, it’s about soil, it’s about biodiversity. Focus on that. Create a brand, and say this is what it is. Let consumers check and verify.
The certification system has become a nightmare. For every fraud they discover, they create 10 new rules. It exponentially multiplies. People who want to comply find it a nightmare. People who don’t want to comply still manage.
I think it’s time we move beyond labels. Organic, natural farming, PGS, residue-free—all these certifications. Focus on the basics. Soil and biodiversity. If you do that right, you can easily avoid pesticides, and your produce will be healthier in nutritional values.
Any certification system is primarily there to build trust. I’m not sure, given the complexity in this country, how easy that will be. One way is to go back to the drawing board, make it very simple, and make penalties very heavy for violators. But it has to be simple enough for farmers to understand. It shouldn’t require a big company to take it up.
Venky Ramachandran: You started the Association of Indian Organic, and I saw the goal is to reach about $10 billion by 2030 for the entire industry. What is the kind of ecosystem work you are attempting to do there?
Raj Seelam: We started the Association in 2014-15. That was a time when organic was growing 15-16%—around when Sikkim was declared an organic state. But then came 2020, and the issue with the EU happened. The government didn’t manage it properly—it was more about certification agencies and their supervision systems, not individual companies.
The last five years since 2020 have been only about battling heavy regulation. I couldn’t talk about building the market, or farmers, or anything. Five years just gone waste.
Bureaucrats, for every issue, try to make it more complicated. More rules. It’s never-ending. And all said and done, no system is going to be perfect. If you get 70-80% right, it’s there—let consumers choose.
Venky Ramachandran: What’s next for Raj Seelam—the 4.0 thesis?
Raj Seelam: A few things we’re working on. One is our Purity Prakruti retail stores—bringing down the cost of products to consumers, making it D2C first. We’re building the tech stack now, should launch in a month or two.
I’ve been experimenting with organic eggs. And I’m seriously interested in whether we can create a platform for scaling up innovative agritech technologies. A lot of solutions exist but none can scale because of various reasons.
Fourth, we’re setting up an R&D centre for nutrition products—both premium and accessible to the bottom of the pyramid.
But the whole thing is still about how we create social impact—whether at the farming level or the consumer level. Let’s see how many of these go from ideas to products or businesses.
Venky Ramachandran: Any final message?
Raj Seelam: You’re doing a great job of connecting everyone, and then pushing the agenda. Please do keep it up.
So, what do you think?
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