A Kolkata Kitchen, Four Choices

The four choices that define everything else

Read the back of enough packets and the same three ingredients keep leading the list: refined flour, cheap oil, refined sugar. Not because anyone is being dishonest. That is simply what the economics of a ₹10 pack demand. We wrote out that arithmetic in full in why packaged food is so cheap.

So the question we actually had to answer was not "should there be another snack brand?" It was "what would it cost to just not do that?" Four decisions came out of it:

Why everything costs the same ₹499

One price across the whole range does two things. It means nobody has to work out which product is the good-value one. More usefully, it removes our own temptation to quietly cheapen a recipe to defend a lower price point. If the price cannot move, the recipe has to hold.

Pack sizes do differ, because the products differ: bites are 180 g, cookies 240 g, cashews 250 g. That is real, and it is printed on the pack.

We print the awkward numbers too

Our Power Bites are 53.8% dates. Dates are largely sugar, so the sugar figure on the nutrition panel is high. It is high for a good reason, but a number on a panel does not come with an explanation attached, and the tempting thing would be to bury it.

We print it instead, along with the percentage of every ingredient, which is not required by law in that form. The reasoning is simple: if our whole argument is that you should read labels, we do not get to be an exception. It is also why we wrote a full article on why dates measure low on the glycaemic index despite the sugar rather than hoping nobody asks.

What "no preservatives" actually costs us

Packaged snacks last months because they are engineered to. Remove the preservatives and the synthetic antioxidants, and you are back to what the food can do on its own. So the operation had to change shape: small batches, faster turnover, tighter storage, and accepting that stock cannot sit.

That is a genuinely harder business than the alternative, and it is the most underestimated consequence of a clean label. The label is the easy part. The logistics are the price.

How we try to earn trust

With no long track record, trust cannot be claimed. The only remaining option is to be checkable:

• Ingredient percentages on every pack, not just an ingredient list.
• Our FSSAI licence number printed, 22825041000300, so you can look us up.
• Real reviews only. Our Google Business Profile is public and rated 5.0 (39 reviews as of July 2026). We have never posted an invented one.
• Articles that say when evidence is weak or a study is small. Our 32 articles cite their sources at the bottom, linked, and nutrition topics are written as education, never as a claim that a Diet Swad product treats anything.

None of that is dramatic and none of it converts anyone on the spot. It just accumulates, and it is the only version that survives being looked into.