The brief
Build the capability to produce a cordyceps supplement in India where every claim about the ingredient could be substantiated from our own records — species, part, substrate, extraction, assay — down to the individual batch a customer holds.
Why not just buy the extract
We tried. The problem was not that suppliers were unwilling to sell — it was that the questions we needed answered were not questions the supply chain was set up to answer.
- Species was frequently declared as "cordyceps" without a binomial name.
- Substrate carry-over was rarely quantified, and beta-glucan was almost never separated from total polysaccharide.
- Certificates of analysis described a sample we had not drawn, from a batch we could not trace to the drum in front of us.
None of this made the material unusable. It made it unverifiable, which is a different problem and a worse one for a company that wanted to publish batch-level data.
The R&D phase — two years, no revenue
We ran the development work at the Regional Centre for Biotechnology, Faridabad. The variables were the obvious ones and they interacted more than we expected: strain, substrate composition, temperature, humidity, light cycle, cycle length, harvest point, extraction solvent and time.
The honest summary is that this took longer than we planned. The cultivation work converged reasonably quickly. Extraction and the analytical method did not — establishing a repeatable assay you actually trust is a slower piece of work than growing the organism, and it is the part nobody budgets for.
The build at Ghamroj
Ground floor, Plot 18–19, HSIIDC Udyog Kunj. Four functions in one building: growth chambers, extraction, QC laboratory, and finished-goods manufacturing.
| Function | Why in-house |
|---|---|
| Cultivation | Control of strain, substrate and cycle; provenance from day zero |
| Extraction | Extract in the bottle and extract in the report come off the same run |
| QC laboratory | We draw our own samples, so the CoA describes material we selected |
| Manufacturing | Batch identity survives from substrate to pack |
The regulatory year
The FSSAI modification application went in on 7 March 2026 with the statement of ingredients, technical personnel details, facility photographs, equipment list and supporting documentation.
Four rounds of queries followed — 27 March, 27 April, 17 June and 22 July — largely concerning minimum usage levels of ingredients and technical personnel. Each was answered in full. The licence and product approval were granted at the end of July.
Five months and four query rounds. If you are planning a similar build, budget for that and start the regulatory conversation earlier than feels necessary. It is not a step you can compress by working harder.
What it bought us
- A batch-level answer. A customer can send us the number off the pack and get the certificate of analysis for the material in it.
- Formulation freedom. Controlling the extract means we can specify against it rather than reformulating around whatever arrived.
- A defensible marketing position. Almost everything on our website is a claim about the customer's body and therefore constrained. "We grew this ourselves" is a claim about us — verifiable, and unusually rare.
It also cost a great deal of capital and two years with nothing to sell. We are not going to pretend that is the right answer for everyone.
What we would do differently
- Start the analytical method development on day one, in parallel with cultivation rather than after it. It was the critical path and we did not treat it that way.
- Open the regulatory conversation a year earlier. Query rounds are not a function of how good your dossier is.
- Photograph everything as it is built. Nobody photographs a facility while it is being built, and afterwards you cannot go back.
Talk to us about the facility
If you are a practitioner, distributor or formulator and want to see the process properly, we will walk you through it.