New Delhi, July 18 -- 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 t...