Navnoor Kaur, a 27-year-old from Ludhiana, recalls her family making a shift from refined sugar to jaggery in 2018.

“The jaggery market in India has been the same for around 50 years now. Jaggery is sold loose and there were no proper innovations or brands in the space,” she says.

So she wanted to create a brand that would provide people with good quality jaggery, making it easier to switch from sugar, while also empowering farmers in Punjab to earn more.

However, while looking for a manufacturing facility, she noted that most of the plants were “roadside”, and thus, targets of dust and pollution.

In time, Navnoor joined hands with an acquaintance, Kaushal Singh, who had his own established manufacturing space that he had been running since 2016.

So, in 2021, the duo decided to build ‘Jagger Cane’ and change people’s mindsets about jaggery “from the ‘sad packaged good’ in departmental stores to a trendy item.

Navnoor and Kaushal tackled the main problem with jaggery of soaking up moisture quickly by studying its biochemistry and then shared their findings with the farmers.

They began guiding them with the timing of harvest, soil quality and the pH of the crop, which must be around 5.7 to 6.2 to keep the product fresh for a longer time.

The brand gained impetus through 2022 with an annual turnover of Rs 2 crore.

Today, Jagger Cane prides itself on being a one-stop solution for people’s jaggery needs and works with a network of 22 farmers in Ludhiana to source the sugarcane.

With an extensive farming network, the brand crushes “200 acres of sugarcane in a year and has 110 acres of contract farming”.

Navnoor notes that they sell 1,000 kg of jaggery every month and have exported 1,90,000 kg to UAE, Canada, Singapore and Australia.