Why We Don't Use Ghee

Picture this: 4 AM, a police team moves in on a unit in Hyderabad. What they find isn't a dairy — it's a chemistry set. Palm oil. Vanaspati. A handful of artificial ghee flavour bottles. Thirty kilos of starch. Not one drop of milk. Commissioner V.C. Sajjanar's team seized 36 tonnes of this — "ghee" that had never come near a cow, sold to families across an entire state as the real thing, days before it would sit on someone's dinner table. That raid happened on 19 August 2026. It is not an isolated story. It is a season.

Every year, in the weeks before Diwali, the same headlines repeat like a ritual nobody wants to admit is a ritual: 8,800 litres of adulterated ghee pulled off Delhi's shelves in a single month. 5,000 kilograms of fake khoya seized from one neighbourhood. A bus stopped in Amritsar carrying a tonne of khoya laced with starch and skimmed milk powder. A Gujarat "dairy" quietly destroying 1,370 litres of milk made from urea and detergent before it could reach a single glass. We grew up believing "pure ghee" was the promise printed on the box. For a meaningful share of what's actually sold in this country, it never was. It was theatre.

And here is the part that should genuinely disturb you: even when this is caught, almost nothing happens. Government data tabled in the Rajya Sabha this year shows that of 8.86 lakh food samples tested nationally over five years, one in five failed. Only 3.3% of those cases — one in thirty — ever ended in a conviction. Three in four were settled with a fine. If you have ever eaten mithai believing the ghee in it was checked, tested, and safe because "someone would catch it" — the numbers say, overwhelmingly, no one did.

That's the purity argument. Now the harder one.

The cruelty we don't get shown

To keep producing milk, a dairy animal has to keep having calves — and every one of those calves is separated from its mother within hours, so the milk goes to us instead of them. The male ones are worth nothing to a dairy. They are not fed to grow; many don't survive their first month. This isn't a fringe claim — it's why India's government itself restricted the sale and manufacture of oxytocin, the hormone injected into already-milked cows and buffaloes to force out more. The Drugs Controller General of India put it in writing, to every state drug authority in the country:

“Reports have appeared time to time... about misuse of Oxytocin... by the farmers and dairy owners to extract milk from milch animals.”

That's not an activist's pamphlet. That's the Government of India's own Directorate General of Health Services — the notice is downloadable at the bottom of this page.

And when a cow or buffalo finally stops producing milk, after years of repeated pregnancies, she doesn't get retirement. This is also, quietly, why India is one of the world's largest exporters of buffalo meat, and a global top-tier exporter of leather — built in part on a raw-material base the industry's own trade body describes as "20% of the world's cattle and buffalo population." Nobody prints that on the mithai box either.

The contradiction nobody says out loud

We revere the cow. We touch her feet on festival mornings, feed her before we feed ourselves, build temples in her name. In the very same country, that reverence and her actual daily reality have quietly become two different things — measured not in belief, but in what the raids, the export data, and the parliamentary record keep independently confirming.

So here's our answer

We didn't build Shudh & Vegan to win an argument. We built it because once you've actually seen where ghee comes from — not the idea of it, the real supply chain, the real raids, the real numbers — you can't go back to pretending the gold lettering on the box means what it says. Purity was the whole promise. We decided to actually keep it.

No ghee. No dairy. Nothing hidden in fine print, anywhere in what we make. Just dates, real nuts, and seeds — hand-rolled, the way mithai was made before anyone decided a shortcut was worth the risk.

Purity was never the ghee. It never had to be.