The Best 5 Gourmet Food Brands Online

'Sustainable' is the word of the decade. Sustainable fashion, agriculture, food, consumption, etc. it is being used in every industry.

What does sustainable mean?

To explain it in Leo Tolstoy's words “One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between man and nature shall not be broken." Specifically in the food world, sustainable is to reintroduce the idea of how we eat, what we consume daily, how and where does it come from.

Organic, Farm to table, conscious, ethical are all words you see on food packaging. But are they really sustainable? Homegrown brands that are eco-friendly, better for animals and committed to a sustainable planet is what we are looking for. Many are social enterprises giving back to a community of farmers and small and marginalized producers. They bring to you the freshest of the ingredients straight from the farmers by paying them what they deserve. These brands, according to us, are truly defined as sustainable brands.

At The Gourmet Box, we love supporting home-grown food brands that take special care in bringing you the freshest of the foods directly from the farms in an eco-sustainable manner. Some of these gourmet food brands are:

Naviluna Artisan Chocolates

David Belo and Angelika Anagnostou, ex-bartenders from London, chanced upon cacao plantations while on a trip across South India. They decided to move to Mysore to start making artisanal chocolate. They source their beans from the Varanashi Farms in Dakshina Kannada, Karnataka, and use ingredients such as Gondhoraj limes and Palmyra sugar.

Theo Organics

Theo Organics farms are located in the pristine environs of the mighty Himalayas. They source their products using traditional methods that have been handed down over the centuries. Employing sustainable harvesting and manufacturing processes, Theo Organics provides employment to hilly region women through co-operatives, farmer's self-help groups in their own processing facilities.

Pascati Chocolates

Pascati is India's first USDA Organic certified and Fair-trade compliant chocolate maker. They source a majority of their ingredients from India. Pascati's main objective is to support the India cacao farmer. Through Fair-trade, they pay a premium for the cacao which goes back to the India cacao farming community in Kerala. It helps generate a better livelihood for the farmer and several community initiatives to sustain the ecosystem. It also ensures that no child labor is used.

Under the Mango Tree Honey

This social enterprise promotes beekeeping in rural Maharashtra and Karnataka to improve agricultural ecosystems and give farmers a steady income. One key problem the founder, Vijaya confronted was that small beekeeping societies across India produced various flavors of honey that never reached urban markets. Furthermore, the typical value chain for agricultural commodities–from plough to plate–is long, arduous and unprofitable: farm gate prices available to Indian farmers are often only 25% of the retail price.

As bees play a crucial role as pollinators in increasing agricultural productivity, a powerful idea began to take shape in Vijaya's head: what if farmers were trained to add bee boxes on farms to facilitate cross-pollination and provided markets to sell the honey collected?

Indian Bean Coffee

Founder Kunal Ross sources fair-trade single-origin coffee from Coorg, Malenadu and BR Hills in Karnataka. They employ free trade practices, sources coffee directly from the farmer, sell it straight over the Internet, and thereby slipping the blushing bean away from the grasp of the exporter. They have built a strong community that supports indigenous and socially conscious farming practices in return bringing to their customer's beans from a single farm without mingling and mucking the taste.

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