Most founders spend their early days worrying about whether anyone will notice their product. Revant Himatsingka worries about the opposite. Every morning, he wakes up hoping that nothing has gone wrong with what he has put on the shelf. "If I make a mistake, I am done," he said at the 17th edition of YourStory’s TechSparks. After years of calling out thousands of companies, he has now become one of them.
During a fireside chat "The trust economy: Can a consumer movement change an industry?" Revant Himatsingka, aka Food Pharmer and founder of Only What's Needed, spoke with Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO of YourStory and The Bharat Project, about the idea behind starting his own brand.
Why the leading brands are not always the most trusted
In most industries, the leading brands are the most trusted ones. In food, Himatsingka argued, the leading brands are often the most misleading. He noticed the misleading ingredients claims on brands while living in the US. One product, for example, read "high protein" while carrying two grams of it. This nudged him to raise his voice against false advertisements.
His diagnosis of the problem was sharp: Indians are educated, but not necessarily health literate. So he took a hard line. He named brands openly, never blurred a logo, and ignored the advice of lawyers who suggested using a rhyming word instead. "Just tell the truth and people will support you," he said.
The price of courage
He was candid about what speaking against large companies cost. He had spent 13 years in the US, won the H-1B lottery, and then walked away from it, quitting his job. Within ten days of arriving, he said, he was fighting some of the biggest companies in the country. His family worried that nobody would hire a controversial person, since the first thing a search of his name would throw up was a fight with a company. There were calls from companies, legal notices and court cases. His original Twitter account was hacked and deleted, which is why he now posts as Food Farmer Two.
Health is a privilege, and it should not be
Why did India never build stringent regulation, or enforce what it had? Himatsingka says the answer lies in our history. As a country that was not rich, the first concern was food, not asking whether the food was healthy. The shift he sees now is that it is becoming commonplace, something everyone expects rather than something a few can afford. He thinks regulation is getting better, but the direction of travel is clear. Strict implementation of food safety rules is where the country needs to go.
That is why his ambitions go well beyond a single product. He described two long-term goals. The first is health education: "I want to get health in every school in India," taught the way we study history, geography, integration and differentiation. The second is label transparency, with a pie chart on every packaged food, so that labels are easy to read and not limited to nutritionists and doctors.
What children are eating
The conversation turned to nutrition among children. Himatsingka did not mince words about where accountability lies. He pointed out a stark double standard: the same food companies that sell sugar-free infant formula in Europe add sugar to their products in India, hooking children on high sweetness from infancy.
"It's not your fault," he reassured adults who grew up eating these products, acknowledging how early habits are engineered. In his view, companies profiting off childhood obesity and compromised health is a tragedy.
From influencer to founder
Only What's Needed was born from a practical problem. Companies were willing to pay him crores of rupees to promote their products, and he refused all food brand deals. If he was not going to monetise by promoting, he needed another way to give people alternatives. So he started his own brand, knowing the risk: having called out so many companies, any slip in his own product would go viral.
He tried to fix, in his own packaging, everything he used to criticise. The nutrition label sits at the front in a large font. Every ingredient appears in a pie chart with its exact percentage, so a plant protein reads like "56% pea protein" rather than a vague list. A QR code opens the label in major Indian languages, because he says only 15 to 20 per cent of India reads English. When a few companies copied his packaging, he did not send a legal notice. He promoted them, because he wants every company to put what goes into your body in big print.
Breaking the rules of marketing
His view of marketing is blunt: its purpose so far has been to repeat what the audience wants to hear. Protein powders say gut friendly, light and clean. Toothpaste promises stronger gums. He wanted to build a brand without claims. Plant protein packs on Amazon are all green, because green signals health and trust, so he did not use green. A designer suggested putting his own face on the pack, and he declined. A legal adviser, the founder recalled, said the nutrition label had to go on the back, and he discovered there was no such rule.
His advice to other founders was to be true to themselves. Many rules, he said, are artificial category codes, like detergent needing to be blue, and not all of them make sense. "If I had listened to them, I would have been one of the many," he said. "Because I broke those rules, I stood out."
The business follows the same logic. Beyond a brief period of Google Ads, triggered when competitors were bidding on his name and some customers bought a rival's protein thinking it was his, OWN has spent nothing on marketing. Instead, he holds public board meetings, shares the strengths and weaknesses of his products, and invites people to visit the factories.
He avoids discount-led festival offers.
Beyond food, and the fear of the next category
Himatsingka sees the movement as bigger than food now. People are asking what is in their skincare, toothpaste, detergent and even sanitary pads. He is also approached constantly, with every industry from banking to paint asking to be exposed, and with offers to co-found anything with the word "clean" in front of it, including, most recently, a clean mosquito repellent.
Skincare is the question he gets most, but he is cautious. He is wary of entering spaces he does not fully understand, because one wrong statement could cost him trust.
The trust economy
He does not claim to have the answer on longevity. He admits that people have short memories, that popularity fades, and that the path ahead is uncertain. He has learned to embrace that uncertainty, and he hopes that if a day comes when he does get something wrong, people will remember that he is human and give him a second chance. The bar, he accepts, is very high, which is why OWN tests its products so heavily.