No sugar, please. This is a phrase we hear everywhere, from kitchens and restaurants to local tea kadais. Keeping their health in mind, urban India is cutting back on sugar and looking for natural substitutes. While, nutritionists and social media influencers are popularising sugar-free diets, making traditional foods, especially sweets, healthier with sweeteners, and brands are selling products with labels that read ‘no refined sugar’.
In a rush to eliminate refined sugar, we often overlook the fact that all sugar substitutes come from the same source — sugarcane. They differ only in how they’re processed, not in their core composition. This raises the question: if we are seeking healthier alternatives, why haven’t we looked beyond sugarcane?
For Kannan and Abinaya, founders of Palm Era Foods in Thoothukudi, the answer lay in the palm tree, a traditional but fading source of sweetener, native to Tamil Nadu. Kannan, an engineering graduate-turned-entrepreneur, hails from a family of palm tree climbers. During a vacation in 2021 from Chennai to his hometown Valliyoor in Tirunelveli district, he witnessed the felling of 30 palm trees in one go as the landowner couldn’t manage the crop damaged by wild boars feeding on fallen palm fruits, which couldn’t be harvested regularly. This moment sparked Kannan’s mission. “I started talking to palm tree climbers and found the main reason they were leaving this job was the lack of proper income. Adulteration and quality loss were other issues. There was no standardisation or industrialisation like that of sugarcane products,” explains Kannan. Recognising this gap, he set out to change the narrative.
Sweet beginnings
Palm trees are a sustainable crop requiring no pesticides or irrigation, yielding eight times more income than sugarcane per hectare, and lasting 150 years. “Sugarcane and paddy consume the most water in Tamil Nadu,” he says. “We can’t replace paddy, but palm trees are a great alternative to sugarcane in the long term.”
Kannan then connected with palm tree climbers to purchase palm fruit from them, with the idea of utilising it to make karupatti (palm jaggery). This led to the founding of their company, Palm Era.
But production came with its set of challenges. Palm jaggery melts and also develops fungus quickly, making storage difficult. To find solutions to this problem, he partnered with university researchers and developed a powdered version that increased shelf life and matched the convenience of white sugar. “Customers don’t need to break the jaggery or boil it anymore. They can just use it in spoonfuls like sugar,” he says.
Harvesting palm sap is seasonal — from April to August — forcing climbers to find other work the rest of the year. Traditionally, women boiled the sap into jaggery themselves and sold it, limiting production. But with the help of Palm Era’s processing model, harvest volumes have doubled, and the climber network has also expanded due to an increase in remuneration and reduced workload. Kannan stresses, “The country’s economy grows only when villages grow.”
To extend employment beyond sap harvesting, Palm Era works with women’s self-help groups to process palm sprouts, generating year-round income for village women and their employees during the off-season.
Today, Palm Era employs 20 people, including 17 women, across Tamil Nadu, and uses machinery for production, blending tradition with modern standards.
But the journey has not been easy. The startup initially suffered financial hardships. Kannan invested his own IT income and quit his job only in May this year. He was also looking for investors, but they questioned the product’s marketability. In March this year, the brand featured in Startup Singam, a startup reality show focusing on startups and MSME investments and growth. “Startup Singam gave us a push, both sales-wise as well as visibility-wise,” Kannan says. The brand attracted an instant commitment of `1 crore from the investors. “Acceptance was really low, but later, with rising awareness and media coverage, acceptance started boosting,” he says.
The road ahead
Their product range now includes probiotic jaggery variants for children and women, supplement powder, palm sprouts powder, digestive bites, and palm-based macaroons. All their products, they claim, are preservative-free and have a clean label.
Though medical research is limited, Kannan believes introducing palm products from childhood can help control blood sugar levels and other lifestyle diseases. “If you start palm sugar in children’s routines, their blood sugar level won’t spike,” he claims.
Kannan now aims to grow the brand further. The first step is to expand to Krishnagiri, where they will procure pathaneer, boil it, and transport it to Thoothukudi for manufacturing products. “We want to help palm climbers while providing quality products to customers — it’s a balance,” he says.
Kannan also envisions palm trees becoming a common cash crop. “It is Tamil Nadu’s state tree...If palm climbing becomes profitable, more people will take it up, and the trees will be conserved. This is my mission,” he concludes.
For more details about the products of Palm Era Foods, visit: thepalmera.in