How Transparency Built India's Most Trusted Health Food Brand - The Whole Truth

When I and Akash became friends, the first new brand he ever introduced me to was The Whole Truth.

At the time, I wasn’t keen on protein bars, and thought them to be a scam.

But after learning about the brand and tasting it, I have never even tried another brand!  

You may have bought a protein bar because the front screams "High Protein!" and "No Added Sugar!" 

And technically, neither claim is a lie. 

But the full picture is buried somewhere between ingredient number nine and a disclaimer in six-point font.

This is how packaged food has operated for decades - with very carefully curated omissions. 

And for the longest time, Indian consumers - raised on Bournvita's "health drink" promise and Maggi's "2-minute" mythology - simply trusted what the front of the pack said. 

Then came a former Hindustan Unilever marketer who had spent years on the inside of this machine, knew exactly how it worked, and decided he was done playing the game.

The insight that led to The Whole Truth was a personal reckoning.

Let’s look at their start-up journey!

The Problem and The Solution: 

Shashank Mehta spent most of his adult life fighting his own body. As a teenager, he weighed close to 110 kilograms. By 19, he had lost 40 of them. Then gained them back. Then lost them again. 

This cycle - gain, lose, repeat - played out three times before he was 26. 

Each time, he turned to what was marketed as "healthy": protein bars, meal replacements, health drinks. Each time, the ingredients told a different story than the packaging did.

After an IIM-Lucknow MBA and nearly a decade at Hindustan Unilever - where he saw firsthand how marketing decisions were made, Mehta started a blog called FITSHIT. 

It was equal parts fitness journal and food industry myth-busting, written with candour. 

In 2019, Mehta co-founded The Whole Truth Foods with Rachna Aggarwal, who became the brand's Chief Product Officer. The company started with a single, non-negotiable rule: every ingredient in every product must appear on the front of the package, in full, in plain language. 

The company was initially called "And Nothing Else" - a name that doubled as a product promise. Every bar, every butter, every chocolate was defined by what it didn't have as much as what it did. They later rebranded to The Whole Truth, extending the philosophy from ingredients to the entire brand ethos.

Initial Challenges: 

Building a brand on radical transparency sounds philosophically elegant. Running the actual business behind it is brutal.

Packaged food is one of the hardest categories to scale in India. The unit economics start tough and only improve slowly. Add to this the structural choice The Whole Truth made to never add preservatives, and you get shelf life of four to six months against a category average of nine to twelve. 

A product that couldn't sit on a shelf for a year was a logistics headache for retailers. The margins weren't generous enough to make distributors enthusiastic. 

And the early consumer, while loyal, was small in number. The brand's D2C model - selling primarily through its own website - was a deliberate first move.

But it also meant the brand was invisible to the vast majority of Indian packaged food shoppers who didn't shop online.

Early product iterations didn't always nail taste. Mehta has spoken about spending months reformulating with Aggarwal to get products that were both genuinely clean and genuinely enjoyable - a combination the category had largely treated as mutually exclusive. 

The FITSHIT blog community became the brand's first growth engine. Mehta had spent years building trust with tens of thousands of readers before he launched a single product. That trust translated into an early customer base that didn't need to be convinced - they were already believers. And those believers became evangelists.

Funding and Revenue:

The Whole Truth has raised $37.6 million across seven rounds from 40 investors.

Alongside institutional money, the angel roster includes Zerodha's Nithin Kamath, Swiggy co-founder Sriharsha Majety, and Rebel Foods co-founder Jaydeep Barman. 

Its recent Series D round led to a valuation of 3,600 Cr+.

Revenue has reflected the conviction. The brand reported ₹65.3 crore in revenue for FY24. By FY25, that number had grown to ₹216 crore. 

Losses narrowed as the brand improved its unit economics and channel mix. A Series D round followed in February 2026 with Sofina and Sauce leading, signalling continued investor confidence in the growth arc. 

Transparency as a Moat

Any brand can put five ingredients in a bar. What makes The Whole Truth defensible is the operational architecture required to keep that promise at scale - and the willingness to absorb the cost.

The brand chose to control its manufacturing rather than outsource to contract facilities that would inevitably push for cost efficiencies that compromise ingredient quality. This vertical integration meant higher upfront costs and slower scaling, but it also meant absolute control over what went into every SKU. 

The content engine was equally strategic. Rather than spend heavily on celebrity endorsements or traditional advertising, the brand built a media property in parallel with its product. 

The newsletter, its long-form presence, and the continuation of Mehta's personal writing voice created a community that self-selected for trust in the brand's philosophy. 

The omnichannel evolution came next. Quick commerce - Blinkit, Zepto, Swiggy Instamart - built frequency and accessibility. Modern trade gave the brand physical presence in premium supermarkets where the target demographic already shops for groceries. 

Category extension followed the same logic. Starting with protein bars, the brand moved into peanut butter, muesli, and dark chocolates where The Whole Truth could offer a 100% clean alternative that still tasted good. 

The result was a category that attracted demographics beyond fitness enthusiasts - women, teenagers, older consumers seeking guilt-free indulgences.

Why Now, Why India

India's protein and healthy snacking market is a genuine structural opportunity. The energy bar market alone is projected to reach nearly $48 million by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 14%. The broader clean-label food segment is expanding as urbanisation, health awareness, and rising disposable incomes converge. 

60% of Indian millennials aged 25-44, according to Sodexo research, now describe themselves as actively pursuing healthier eating.

Quick commerce has been a particularly significant unlock. The ability to order a protein bar and have it delivered in ten minutes has fundamentally changed how Indian consumers interact with health snacks. The purchase is no longer a planned trip to a specialty store - it's an impulse decision made after a workout, during a craving, or as an alternative to ordering junk food delivery. 

And the regulatory environment is, slowly, catching up. FSSAI has tightened labelling requirements, demanding clearer disclosure of sugar content and more rigorous substantiation of health claims. For The Whole Truth, which was already operating at the maximum level of transparency before regulation required it, the tightening of standards is a competitive advantage arriving in the form of a compliance burden for everyone else.