We didn't come from food companies. That turned out to be the point.
A decade building and scaling consumer products, across India and the US.
But the parts I keep coming back to had nothing to do with my job.
At Berkeley Haas, I was a member of Food @ Haas — the community of people building the next generation of food brands. And I led a team at the Alt: Meat Lab, working with nutrition science and biochemistry majors on a problem that sounds small until you try to solve it: making soy milk without the aftertaste.
Enzymatic processing. Months of iteration. The lab was later featured in the Netflix documentary You Are What You Eat.
That was the first time I understood the thing this whole company is built on — "healthy" tasting bad is not a law of nature. It's an unsolved problem. Most people just stopped trying to solve it.
Living in the Bay Area also gave me an accidental education in premium sugar-free — allulose going mainstream, monk fruit on shelves, Tru Fru in every Whole Foods. I tasted my way through most of it. Then I'd come home to India and taste what was here, and it was a different world — stevia bitterness, erythritol cooling, compromise dressed up as a category.
In June 2026 I moved back to India and started Audacious with Indrani.
I run business and strategy. She runs product and operations. That division of labour turned out to be the whole strategy.
I've been baking and eating this way for years before it had a name.
Long before Audacious, I was writing about food on my blog, baking at home most weekends, and quietly rebuilding my own relationship with sugar as part of a fitness journey. When Ananjan came home from the US ranting about how bad sugar-free desserts tasted in India, I'd already spent years cooking around the same problem — figuring out what worked with dates, with allulose, with the sugar-free chocolate I could actually source here.
The kitchen has always been where I think most clearly. Recipes, ingredient sourcing, texture, taste — these are the parts of the business I own.
At Audacious I lead culinary — recipe development, product refinement, the taste standard we don't compromise on. If a batch doesn't taste right, it doesn't go out. That's my job.
We got married. That's the personal answer. The professional one is that we spent months at our kitchen counter in Pune arguing about texture, batch sizes, sweetener ratios, and what "premium" actually meant when the customer might be a 55-year-old diabetic who missed his grandmother's caramel custard, or a 30-year-old fitness enthusiast who hadn't eaten a store-bought dessert in five years.
Ananjan brought the operator instincts and years of tasting. Indrani brought the culinary judgment and the discipline of someone who has been building this way of eating into her own life for a long time. Both of us brought a specific frustration: Indian premium dessert innovation had stalled at "healthier version of the same idea" — protein bars, laddoos with jaggery, sugar-free mithai with the same aftertaste as everything else.
We wanted to build the thing that didn't exist. So we're building it.
Four desserts. Each sweetened deliberately for what that dessert actually needs. One kitchen in Pune. A pilot launching in 2026. A category that has waited too long for someone to take it seriously.
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