Building Konkan Still from Scratch

The Starting Point

The Konkan Coast has one of the most distinctive food cultures in India — coconut, Byadgi chillies, kokum, fermented cured meats, centuries of maritime spice trade — and almost none of it had made it onto a shelf. Not in a way that felt true to the region. Most condiments borrowing from Goan or Maharashtrian traditions felt diluted or genericised for mass appeal. The specificity — the slow-cooked depth, the smokiness from proper Goan chorizo, the laterite-soil flavours — was missing.

That gap is what Konkan Still set out to close.

Finding the Right Collaborator

The brand only works because of Chef Vasquito. He operates out of his kitchen in Anabar, Old Goa, and his philosophy is deceptively simple: no shortcuts, small batches, and nothing leaves the kitchen unless he’d serve it himself. Getting him on board meant the product quality was never a question — the only work was building the brand and the infrastructure around him.

Together, we settled on a clear mandate: capture the Konkan Coast in a jar. Smoked, spiced, slow-cooked. Every product had to carry a sense of place.

The First Product

We launched with Chorizo Jam — slow-cooked Goan chorizo folded with caramelised onions and spices. It was the right call as a first product: bold enough to communicate the brand’s intent, versatile enough to earn a place in someone’s everyday kitchen. The feedback was immediate. Customers were eating it on eggs, on toast, stirred through pasta. One recurring note in reviews: “You can taste the slow cooking.” That was the whole point.

The Chilli Oil followed — Konkan chillies infused in cold-pressed oil with complementary aromatics. A second product that reinforced the same identity: regional ingredients, careful preparation, real depth of flavour.

Taking It to Market

From Vasquito’s kitchen to market wasn’t a single moment — it was a series of decisions about where Konkan Still belonged and who it was for. I focused on Goa first, building presence across four markets. The goal wasn’t volume. It was establishing the brand in the right contexts: places where the provenance story mattered, where buyers understood what small-batch meant, and where the product would be treated well.

That market-by-market approach let us stay in control of quality and messaging at every touchpoint. Growing too fast, too broadly, too early would have diluted exactly what makes the brand worth anything.

Where It’s Going

The Konkan Coast produces far more than chorizo and chilli. There’s a whole shelf worth of flavours that haven’t been bottled properly — pickles, chutneys, spiced oils, ferments rooted in coastal Karnataka and the Malabar region. The plan is to expand the product line by working up the coast, sourcing ingredients and methods from each stretch of coastline and bringing them into the Konkan Still range with the same rigour we applied to the first two products.

The brand line says it: a coastline’s worth of flavour. We’re only at the beginning of what that means.