No sugar, please. We hear this everywhere, be it the kitchen and restaurants or local tea kadais. Urban India, with their health in mind, is reducing its intake of sugar and opting for natural alternatives. While, sugar-free diets are being endorsed by nutritionists and social media influencers, traditional foods, especially sweets, are being made healthier through sweeteners, and companies are selling products labeled 'no refined sugar'.
In the haste to get rid of table sugar, we tend to forget that all sweet substitutes are derived from the same thing — sugarcane. They vary only in processing, not in fundamental composition. So the question is: if we want healthier options, why haven't we experimented beyond sugarcane?
For Aishwarya and Kannan, Palm Era Foods founders from Thoothukudi, the solution was the palm tree, an old but declining source of sweetener, indigenous to Tamil Nadu. Kannan, an engineering graduate turned entrepreneur, is from a clan of palm tree climbers. While taking a holiday in 2021 from Chennai to his native village Valliyoor in Tirunelveli district, he saw 30 palm trees cut down at one time since the owner couldn't control the crop spoiled by wild boars eating discarded palm fruits, which could not be picked seasonally. This experience ignited Kannan's mission. “I started talking to palm tree climbers and found the main reason they were leaving this job was the lack of proper income. Adulteration and quality loss were other issues. There was no standardisation or industrialisation like that of sugarcane products,” explains Kannan. Recognising this gap, he set out to change the narrative.
Sweet beginnings
Palm trees are a pesticide- and irrigation-free crop that produces eight times the income of sugarcane per hectare and lasts for 150 years. "Sugarcane and paddy use the largest amount of water in Tamil Nadu," he says. "We cannot substitute paddy, but palm trees are an excellent substitute for sugarcane in the long run."
Kannan then approached palm tree climbers to buy palm fruit from them, with a plan to use it to produce karupatti (palm jaggery). It was through this that they established their company, Palm Era.
But manufacturing was not without its problems. Palm jaggery is prone to melting and also easily infests fungus, which makes it hard to store. To seek solutions to this issue, he collaborated with university researchers and came up with a powdered variety that improved shelf life and was as convenient as white sugar. "Customers no longer have to break the jaggery or boil it. They can simply use it in spoonfuls like sugar," he states.
Harvesting palm sap is seasonal, between April and August, sending climbers to seek alternate employment the other nine months of the year. Women traditionally boiled the sap into jaggery themselves and sold it, which put a cap on production. But with Palm Era's processing model assisting them, the volumes harvested have doubled, and the climber network has also grown with a rise in remuneration and decreased workload. Kannan emphasizes, "The country's economy grows only when villages grow."
To provide employment beyond sap harvesting, Palm Era collaborates with women's self-help groups to process palm sprouts, which yield round-the-year income for village women and their staff during the off-season.
Presently, Palm Era has 20 employees, out of whom 17 are women, in Tamil Nadu, and employs machinery for production, where tradition meets modern standards.
But it hasn't been smooth sailing. The startup company initially faced financial difficulties. Kannan used his own IT revenues and left his job only in May this year. He even sought investors, but they doubted the marketability of the product. In March this year, the brand appeared in Startup Singam, a startup reality show dealing with startups and MSME investments and expansion. "Startup Singam provided us with a boost, both sales-wise as well as visibility-wise," Kannan states. The company garnered an immediate investment of `1 crore from the investors. "Acceptance was very poor, but subsequently, with the growing awareness and publicity, acceptance began increasing," he states.
The journey ahead
Their product line currently comprises probiotic jaggery variants for women and children, supplement powder, palm sprouts powder, digestive bites, and palm macaroons. All their products, they say, are preservative-free and have a clean label.
Although there is limited research in the medical field, Kannan is convinced that bringing palm products from an early age can regulate blood sugar and other lifestyle disorders. "If you implement palm sugar in the children's regimen, their blood sugar level will not fluctuate," he says.
Kannan wants to expand the brand further. The next step is to go to Krishnagiri, source pathaneer, boil it, and ship it to Thoothukudi for production of products. "We want to benefit palm climbers as well as offer good products to customers — it's a balance," he explains.
Kannan also dreams of palm trees being a universal cash crop. "It is Tamil Nadu's state tree.If palm climbing becomes profitable, more people will take it up, and the trees will be conserved. This is my mission," he concludes.
