As a mother of two girls, I found myself looking carefully into the various products that we were consuming in my family.
I am a product of my upbringing—more my father’s daughter and a tad less my mother’s. I was brought up in a defense services household. Discipline underlined everything. There was the diligence to take tasks to completion but side by side I also kept firing up rebellions—some small and some big.
I grew up valuing the basics. Food had to be healthy and that meant valuing and learning how to cook home-made recipes. Sports were essential. A pursuit of an art was a must. And mathematics was a language to speak often. If it sounds like an ordeal, it wasn’t, it was just that these were the basics with which I grew up. I did my Bachelors in Engineering and was an independent woman at an early age. But for my parents, especially my mom, that was no excuse to miss the nuances of home cooked food and associated healthy practices.
My father also developed a strong interest in homeopathy and I somehow also found myself his apprentice. Even today, my father and I discuss various homeopathic remedies in detail and debate and discuss our approaches. None of us is professionally qualified but safe to say that we are quite ardent hobbyists in the field. I think as I look back, this confluence of interests somehow drove me to look into food and beverage products with much more detail.
As a mother of two girls, I found myself looking carefully into the various products that we were consuming in my family. I would research food labels diligently and be curious of about the cooking process. I realized that being a working mom would not always allow me to personally cook and oversee the food that was served at our home table. I just became more alert about the nature of packaged food that was being consumed. In due time, I became quite proficient in understanding the packaged food industry’s approaches and quite rightly became very alarmed.
This led me to set up Orchard Lane. I strongly felt that I had to create a brand that today’s busy parents could trust for their families. Not everyone can select the right healthy base ingredients and then prepare food at home. Our daily personal and professional lives are often jet-paced. Packaged food has to be a part of our lives but in a responsible way.
Gagandeep Kaur Gill is the founder of Orchard Lane, a natural jams and preserves brand in India. (Please note at this time the company only delivers within India.)
Gagandeep was born in Northern India, in the state of Punjab. She holds a degree in Bachelors of Computer Science Engineering and is equally bent towards art, philosophy and creative hobbies. She spent a few years practicing fine art mentored by a professional artist known for his oils on canvas.
