Our story
Two grandmothers,
one steel tin.
Juzt Homemade started the way most food businesses in India actually start — with somebody's family recipe, and too many people asking for a second box.
There is a particular sound that means winter in an Indian house: a steel tin being prised open on a high shelf. Inside it, wrapped against the cold, a dozen laddoos that somebody's grandmother rolled by hand over three days.
Both of ours did it. One of them made gond laddoos every November, in a kadhai so heavy it took two hands to lift, and packed them off to whichever grandchild looked thinnest. The other made til gud every January for Sankranti, said the same line while handing them out — til gul ghya, god god bola, take this sweet and speak sweetly — and refused, always, to write the recipe down.
We never set out to start a food business. We set out to reverse-engineer two grandmothers. That took a lot of failed batches.
A sweet much older than any of us
The laddoo is not a modern invention, and it did not begin as a dessert. It began, by most accounts, as medicine.
The word itself comes from the Sanskrit lattika — a small ball. And tradition credits the ancient physician and surgeon Sushruta with one of its earliest forms: sesame and jaggery bound into balls and given to patients, because a ball was simply the most practical way to hand someone a measured dose of something nourishing. Everything that made it good medicine — calorie-dense, shelf-stable, portable, no cutlery required — is exactly what later made it good travel food, good festival food, and good temple food.
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The beginning
A ball of sesame and jaggery
Bound sweets appear in the ancient medical tradition as a way of carrying nourishment in a form that keeps, travels, and needs no plate.
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Along the road
Food that survived the journey
Flour, ghee and jaggery keep for weeks without refrigeration. The laddoo became what you packed for soldiers, traders and anyone crossing a long distance.
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In the temple
The sweet you offer first
It became prasad — the offering placed before the deity and shared afterwards. Ganesha is depicted holding one. The Tirupati laddu is made in such volume, and to such a specific recipe, that it now carries a Geographical Indication tag.
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Across the map
A different laddoo in every state
Besan, boondi, motichoor, rava, coconut, churma, til, gond — the same idea rolled from whatever the region grew and however it liked its sweetness.
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In winter kitchens
Gond, panjeeri, and looking after people
In North Indian homes, gond laddoos and panjeeri became the food of cold months and of new mothers — made in bulk, stored in a tin, handed out by grandmothers with strong opinions about how many you had eaten.
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Now
Back to what it was
Somewhere along the way the laddoo turned into a box of refined sugar and palm oil. What we make is a return to the older version — seeds, nuts, ghee, gud — which was never a health trend. It was just the recipe.
The two kitchens
Dadi & Nani
The name DadiNani Foods is not branding. It is an accounting of where each recipe came from.
Dadi
The winter side
Gond, panjeeri, alsi. Her cooking was built around the cold months — the kadhai came out in November and did not go back into the cupboard until February. She measured nothing and was never wrong.
She believed that anyone leaving the house should be carrying food, and that a tin sent with a grandchild would come back empty and be refilled. Both of those turned out to be a reasonable business model.
Nani
The festival side
Til gud in January, coconut and aliv when someone needed feeding up. Her laddoos were smaller, sweeter, and rolled at a speed nobody in this generation has managed to match.
She is the reason we use jaggery and not sugar — not for any health reason she would have recognised, but because she thought sugar tasted of nothing.
How this became a business
It started with a batch made for the family and a few boxes sent to friends. Then the friends asked for more, and asked whether they could pay for them, and asked whether we did the flaxseed one in a bigger size. At some point "making laddoos for people" quietly became "taking orders", and it seemed sensible to give it a name.
Juzt Homemade is that name. The spelling is deliberate. The promise in it is narrow and we intend to keep it narrow: this is food made at home, in small batches, by hand, by one person who knows exactly what went into every box that leaves.
What we will and won't do
- Rolled to order. Nothing is made in advance to sit in stock. Your batch is made the week you order it.
- Jaggery and dates, not refined sugar. This is a taste decision first.
- No preservatives, no colour, no palm oil. The ingredient list stays short enough to read aloud.
- Chocolate versions for children. Four of the laddoos come in a cocoa version, because a child who eats the chocolate one is still eating the seeds.
- We won't claim it cures anything. It is good food made carefully. That is the whole claim.