The Future Is Here: better. Reimagines the Humble Jackfruit

Keertida Phadke and Karan Bajaj, co-founders of better., are committed to making jackfruit more accessible, and easier to use, in the modern Indian kitchen.

On the first day of summer vacation, Keertida Phadke and her entire family, would land up at her grandfather’s home in Ratnagiri — a lush gem nestled between the Sahyadri Hills and the Arabian Sea on the coast of Maharashtra. Among memories of those glorious days, surrounded by cousins, aunts and uncles, Keertida’s memories of the foods from that time linger on. She remembers the heady smell of mangoes ripening under hay, and jackfruits so swollen they’d burst open without the persuasion of a knife. “The ripe fruit would be pulped and turned into fanas sandane, a traditional steamed rice-grits cake, served along with sweetened coconut milk.”

Decades later, as a chef and food entrepreneur, Keertida still finds herself at her mother’s house at the beginning of each summer, to eat one of her favourite dishes — phanasachi bhaji — a raw jackfruit preparation. Think mustard seeds, curry leaves, cumin seeds, split green chillies tempered in peanut oil, shredded raw jackfruit stir-fried in this mix, spiced with the less fiery, but fragrant and floral goda masala — a staple of Maharashtrian cuisine, a bit of jaggery and mighty handfuls of grated coconut. “Eaten always with rice and amti — toor dal cooked with kokum, jaggery and a sprinkling of goda masala to continue the flavour profile through the dishes,” says Keertida, putting together her plate of comfort food for us. 

While many of us have similar memories around food and family, the humble jackfruit doesn’t get top billing in the telling of these stories. Keertida gives us insight to the reasons this might be. “While India is the largest producer of jackfruit with over 20 lakh tonnes yielded annually, almost 70 percent of the fruit gets wasted in the country,” Keertida tells us. “It is hard to imagine, but jackfruit trees grow like weeds, they are scattered trees and need no special care or attention to thrive. And except for a single plantation in Tamil Nadu, it isn’t cultivated commercially on a large-scale anywhere else in the country,” she explains. This results in the supply of the fruit being scattered as well.

Other hurdles to the popularity of the jackfruit are factors like its difficulty in harvesting — each fruit matures at a different time, and quickly perishes once taken off the tree; it takes battling with the hard exterior and gummy latex to get to each bulb of fruit; regional preferences for a particular stage of ripeness; and its association as ‘poor man’s food’. “While in the five Southern states, it is eaten raw and ripe, the rest of the country prefers raw jackfruit. In Bengal, raw jackfruit is known as tree-goat, for its meaty texture,” Keertida tells us. Keertida, along with her co-founder Karan Bajaj, are determined to change this image of jackfruit in the country. Together, they have launched a line of jackfruit products under the brand better., which focuses on plant-based alternatives. “It’s nostalgia made convenient,” she sums up as the idea behind their products.

And this isn’t just her business pitch. Keertida has returned to her native home in coastal Maharashtra to source the jackfruit, and has even located a processor from the same region. “Fruits harvested during the end of Feb until mid-April in this region give us the perfect rawness we want, which then gave us the texture we were looking for in our product,” she adds. better. uses retortion, a heat treatment process, that allows the Jackfruit to be preserved in its pristine state without any preservatives or chemicals.. They have created four flavours of ready-to-cook raw jackfruit products: Original Jackfruit, Jackfruit Malabar Curry, Jackfruit Malaikari, and Jackfruit Vindaloo Stir-fry.

Keertida and Karan have become evangelists of the jackfruit; they’ve understood its value as highly nutritious besides having numerous health benefits. But they’ve also focussed on achieving the right process and right texture before bringing it into the market. “Raw jackfruit surprisingly has an inherently meaty texture — a reason that most Jains don’t eat it,” she points out. “But also because it mimics the texture of meat, is the reason it has gained popularity in the West, finding itself replacing pulled pork in tacos or being turned into patties for burgers as plant-forward and vegan options,” she says. 

Keertida Phadke, co-founder of better.

Karan Bajaj, co founder of better.

Now, this healthy ingredient is available to be included in everyone’s pantry essentials without any of the laborious effort of cleaning the fruit. better.’s ready-to-eat raw jackfruit just requires three easy steps to a delicious dish. “With the original, you can really play around with it. You can make a simple tadka, onion, tomato base sabzi or turn it into faux meatballs for your spaghetti bolognese,” Keertida says. But limited only by imagination, the possibilities are endless. “It works as perfectly as a neutral base much like potato or chicken, and absorbs all of the other spices, masalas or flavours that you put into the dish,” she tells us. “And much like the potato or chicken, it is sure have you hooked after the first bite.”

At their do-it-yourself focus group research, before the launch of the product, they found that those entirely unfamiliar with the raw jackfruit as an ingredient were intrigued, and the familiar set were “excited by the three novel ways of eating the raw jackfruit that we’d offered at our tasting sessions, as they were used to more traditional, regional preparations,” she explains. “We understand that this isn’t the most obvious product but it is a game-changing one. We have done extensive research into the benefits of jackfruit and perfected our process of providing our customer with ready-to-eat raw jackfruit,” she says. “And it’s a healthy addition to the vegetarian, vegan or plant-forward diet, and works as a great alternative to meat,” she adds. “We’re just here to help people make better choices.”

And you won’t have to wait for summer to make memories filled with this delicious tropical fruit any longer, since better.’s new line of raw jackfruit products are available year round. Maybe it will eventually become part of your go-to plate of comfort food, like Keertida Phadke — try it, there’s everything to gain. 

better.’s range of jackfruit ready-to-eat packages

Thank you to our friends at better. for sponsoring this feature. You can purchase better.’s jackfruit products here and on Amazon. Follow along their Instagram handle @eatwithbetter for jackfruit-based recipes and new launch updates.

Joshua Muyiwa is a Bangalore-based poet, columnist and freelance writer. You can follow him @silverbangled

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