Who we are

Our Story

Three generations of knowing what good oil tastes like.

It started with a question

My grandfather pressed his own groundnut oil every season. He had a small wooden ghani in the courtyard — a heavy wooden press turned by a bullock, slow and patient. The oil that came out was golden, thick with flavour, and smelled like something alive. We used it for everything.

When he passed away, the ghani was sold. We started buying oil from the shop like everyone else. For years, I didn't think about it. Then one evening I was making my mother's recipe — the same dish she'd made every Sunday — and something was missing. The oil had no smell. The dish had no depth. The ingredient was technically the same. But it wasn't the same at all.

Finding the old way again

I started asking questions. It turned out that most commercially-sold oil goes through a process called solvent extraction — the seeds are flooded with hexane (a petroleum by-product) to pull every last drop of oil out, then the hexane is boiled off, and the resulting oil is bleached, deodorised, and refined until it's shelf-stable but essentially flavourless.

Cold-pressed and wood-pressed oils skip all of that. The seeds are pressed mechanically, at low temperature, with no chemicals. Less oil per kilogram — which is why it costs more — but everything the seed contains, all the flavour compounds and natural antioxidants and nutrients, stays in the bottle.

What iksvaku stands for

We named the brand after the Iksvaku dynasty — one of the oldest lineages in Indian history, with roots in the land and in agriculture. The name felt right for something trying to recover what was almost lost.

We don't want to be the biggest oil brand in India. We want to be the one your family trusts. The one where you can taste the difference, where the smell of the oil when it hits the hot pan takes you somewhere specific — a kitchen you remember, a dish that matters. That's what we're pressing toward.

“The oil my grandfather pressed had a smell that told you exactly what was in it. That’s what we’re trying to give back.”
— Founder, iksvaku.store

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