Sahaja Aharam is an initiative began to link consumers directly to rural organic producers.  In 2008, it started as Farmers’ Market ‘Just Food’ at CSA office in Tanaka, where consumers can directly buy from organic farmers every week.

We quickly realised it is not a scalable model, as the expenses for farmers to travel are higher, processing and storing grains, carrying back remaining unsold grains were tedious and expensive. To overcome these constraints, we brought together few consumers and registered as ‘Sahaja Aharam Consumer Cooperative’ in 2009 and opened a retail store.

From 2009 to 2016, five years Sahaja Aharam managed to supply to other farmers markets and stores rather than expanding the retail stores. While, demand for Organic food business started going up from 2012, it never converted into benefit to the producers. In the mean time, our work with producers and farmers cooperatives expanded and 2014 we registered the federation of farmers cooperatives as ‘Sahaja Aharam Producer Company (SAPCO), and the consumer cooperative also became a shareholder of the federation, the retail stores are also taken over by the Federation.

From 2016, we started organising retail stores on a franchise model and first store was started in Vishakhapatnam. Later, stores are opened in Kukatpally, Kharkana in Hyderabad.