How Two Brothers Grows 🪴

As a child, one of the things we would do on our annual village visits was to carry mustard seeds to the local wooden kolhu and return with tins of freshly pressed oil.  Watching the bulls go round in circles, slowly coaxing oil out of the seeds, was an experience in its own right. Back home, the kitchen would be filled with the sharp aroma of fresh mustard oil, and aloo-pyaaz pakoras were always on the menu.

But by the time I reached high school, cold-pressed oil had been replaced by large plastic yellow jars. Saffola/Dhara was the oil used by all the households. Cold-pressed belonged to the past.

Now, the world’s coming full circle.

Cold-pressed oil is back in the buzz. As Nikhil Kamath recently pointed out, and I’ve written about it before, “India’s trade is going to get more inward-looking.” Consumers will want to know about sourcing, supply chains, and clean processes. And cold-pressed oil, with its rustic appeal and minimal intervention, is the perfect candidate for this shift.

So in today’s edition, we are turning our spotlight on one of the quietly compelling players in India’s cold-pressed revival—Two Brothers Organic Farms, backed by Rainmatter, the Zerodha-funded sustainability initiative.

Here’s what we’ll unpack in this edition:

The fat-growing oil market

India’s edible oil market is worth over ₹4 lakh crore, and 87% of the market is branded. If i had to guess, this is mostly because of the strong distribution muscle and the years of branding from oil makers like Adani (Fortune), Marico (Saffola), and Patanjali.

From a type of oil POV, palm leads the oil category with 42% share, followed by Soya, Mustard, Sunflower and Others(Sesame, Coconut, etc). Palm dominates because it’s cheap, stable at high temperatures, and used in nearly every restaurant, hotel, and snack factory. Soybean and sunflower follow closely, largely because of bulk imports and subsidies.

Cold-pressed oils, on the other hand, don’t register as a formal category, and I couldn’t find it on any publicly available information websites. But estimates put it at 2–3%. And more importantly, the tiny cold-pressed slice is growing at a CAGR of 7.2%. (This is what early adoption looks like!). 

For now, Cold-pressed oil is an urban story. Bengaluru leads, thanks to a combination of health-conscious consumers, organic store density, and active D2C discovery. Pune, Chennai, and Mumbai follow.

As the numbers show, cold-pressed is no longer a fancy product for the elite. It is slowly becoming an everyday choice for conscious consumers. Let’s look at what makes cold-pressed oil matter and what the alternatives are doing to us. 

Why should you care about healthy frying?

Refined oil is everywhere. It’s in our daily meals, our hot hot samosas, and in nearly every packaged snack we order off BlinkIt or Instamart. It’s one of the most consumed ingredients in India. And yet, we rarely question it.

Because packaging visuals make us feel like we’re making a smart, healthy choice. A red heart or a slim-jumping kid with taglines like “lite” or “heart” makes us feel better. But in reality, that’s years of media campaigns by oil manufacturers playing with how you perceive health. The “lite” and “heart” keywords are a part of the brand name and have no bearing on the actual healthiness of the products. 

Let’s go a little deeper and see why it is unhealthy,

At its core, oil is simple. You take seeds, you press them, and it churns out its oil. But in the world of large-scale manufacturing, simplicity is the enemy of scale. To extract the maximum oil from every seed, producers turn to chemical solvents - specifically, hexane. This helps extract more yield per batch. Post-extraction, the oil is stripped of any remaining hexane, then bleached and deodorized until it looks clean, clear, and brand-ready.

But even after all that, trace amounts of hexane can remain in the oil: technically, within "permitted" limits.

Then there's the second layer of risk: repeated use. In both homes and restaurants, oil isn't always a single-use ingredient. It’s filtered, reheated, and reused multiple times. For restaurants, oil makes up 30–40% of operating costs. At home, it accounts for a similar share of your grocery bill. So naturally, we stretch its life.

But heating oil repeatedly, especially to high frying temperatures, creates toxic compounds. Restaurants may have test strips to check if oil is still usable, but you’ll rarely see them being used. And at home, we rely on smell and color.

The medical downsides of this are serious. Repeatedly heated oils have been linked to inflammation, heart disease, and, as per ICMR findings, even increased cancer risk. According to Fortis Hospital’s Dr. Mangesh Kamath, this is one of the most overlooked contributors to India's rising health burden.

The result? Over 70% of India’s urban population is now classified as overweight. We rank third globally in obesity, behind only the US and China.

So yes, healthy frying matters. But the good news is, the market is starting to shift. Consumers are paying attention. And a quiet revolution is underway.

The Corporate’s cold-pressed push and the D2C differentiator

The organic market has been quietly increasing in India over the last decade, but it has picked up steam recently. Earlier last year, Tata acquired Organic India, and recently, they launched ‘Tata Simply Better’ - a direct play into the cold-pressed aisle. 

Adani, Emami would soon be putting up their guardrails to save their market share. But this increases the consumer pie for everyone. Large oil makers would do umbrella marketing, raising overall market awareness, and overall cold-pressed oil consumption will increase. 

Given their sheer distribution capability, large corporates might be able to capture a sizeable chunk too, but D2Cs have something that they won’t be able to overpower easily: Honest stories

For years, D2C brands like Two Brothers held their ground with better storytelling and controlling the entire supply chain. 

They might be slightly premium-priced, but over the years, they’ve built a strong trust capital. 

Let’s go into how it all started first, and then take a closer look at their storytelling moat.

How Two Brothers Started?

After spending almost a decade in corporate jobs, brothers Satyajit and Ajinka Hange moved to their parents' profession of farming. They left their jobs (Satyajit at ICICI Lombard, Ajinkya at Deutsche Bank), and returned to their family’s farmland in Bhodani, a village near Pune.

Their father had grown sugarcane for years, but like most small farmers in Maharashtra, he saw little of the profits.Margins were swallowed up by cooperatives, transport middlemen, and restrictive policies. Even when farmers worked hard and produced well, the system rarely rewarded them.

A little before 2013, the two brothers decided to redo this.

Using inherited land and personal savings, they began experimenting with organic farming. They called their venture Two Brothers Organic Farms TBOF)—a vertically integrated, seed-to-shelf food brand. They started small with fruits and veggies sold in the local fruits market but over time, their catalogue expanded to include ghee, cold-pressed oils, jaggery, and more.

Now, owning a farm and growing organic food isn’t unique. Plenty of Indians do that, and many more could, if they had the time and intent. But very few have turned it into a 311 Cr brand. 

This means the differentiator for Two Brothers goes beyond owning the value chain. So, let’s look at how they have taken their produce to market and turned slow farming into a fast-moving trust.  👇

Two Brothers GTM: Grinding slow, Winning fast

In the GTM segment, I’m going to cover only what sets them apart from large manufacturers. To put it simply, Conglomerates have the market (so far), but Two Brothers has the story.

We will be looking at something they continue doing that doesn’t scale(but spreads like wildfire) and how their founders are leading growth from the front.

Paul Graham says that early on, startups should do things that don’t scale.

If you have been following me for a while, you may have read that one of the early GTM strategies startups can deploy is “meeting customers offline”. Two Brothers adopted this as one of their levers to get into the market.

Farmer’s Market

Ajinkya and Satyajit identified the Farmer’s Market in Mumbai’s upmarket areas, such as Bandra, to be the perfect place to showcase their products. This is where you are highly likely to meet an aware, conscious crowd, and you get a chance to share your story in your voice and get their buy-in on what you do. Over time, farmers’ markets also turned out to be a place to interact with celebrities and add to their credibility and brand positioning. 

Here’s a snippet of Jackie Shroff and Shraddha Kapoor visiting their stall. (The caption in Jackie Shroff’s post is very well put)

Show-Me-How with Farmer relationships

The backbone of their operations goes beyond ‘farm-to-fork’ to ‘face-to-face’. Two Brothers deploys farmer relationship managers across their sourcing belt to ensure quality, traceability, and ongoing engagement. From oil extraction walkthroughs to packaging to farmer engagement, they show every step of the process.

There’s no factory opacity. Instead, there are Instagram videos of chuckles with farmers, solar drying, and so on. It’s content, but it’s also proof.

Here are two videos showcasing how their FRM’s (Farmer Relationship Managers) upskill farmers’ farming know-how and the heartfelt gifts they get from them.

Founder-led distribution

Satyajit and Ajinkya are building the brand with their face, voice, and becoming the frontline educators of TBOF. Here’s how they do it

Personal Stories

They regularly document their own routines. From harvesting to local events, you can clearly see them grounding the brand in village reality. In short, transparency at scale.

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See for yourself: Quality checks

They go to their labs and film their quality checks. You don’t have to rely on the ingredients behind a pouch; you can see it for yourself.

Selling with "Why"

In every piece of content, like the one shown below, you see the why behind the what. Why do they grow what they grow? What the oil factories don’t tell you? What makes them move to a simpler setup to make their products?

Food facts with Satyajit

From reels explaining millet health to caption essays on soil revival, they teach as they sell. And that earns trust.

Traditions in Action

In every reel, there’s heritage at play. Traditional kolhus, Indigenous cattle breeds, and heirloom seeds all in one place, build their core culture and narrative.

Nostalgic glimpses of village life

Some of the village life images and videos they share give serious childhood flashbacks - Jumping into the river, clay stoves, mustard flowers in bloom, and sleepy afternoons under the banyan trees 

Stories of village folks

Like TVF’s Panchayat brings stories of different village folks in a quirky way with us, Two Brothers also shares stories of village people with big dreams.

Building a media flywheel beyond Instagram

They’ve extended this narrative into:

• Podcasts, like their chat with Dr. Abhay Dandekar on health and nutrition

• Mini-documentaries, under the Farm to Fork series on YouTube

• Coffee-table books, like Memories on a Plate, that connect food to village nostalgia

• Community collaborations, like their campaign with Plant Future, tying clean food to climate awareness

Going through their GTM efforts and organic roots, it seems what they’re building isn’t just a D2C brand, tt’s a storytelling engine rooted in rural truth.

Very Powerful! 💪

Alright then, that’s it from me on Two Brothers and the rise of Cold-pressed oils.

Until next time!

Saurabh 👋