Thelawala (Hindi), Thallugaadi (Kannada), Thalluvandi (Tamil), Thopodubandi (Telugu)

This is where the rubber meets the road. While we export a lot of cereals, pulses, spices, fruits & vegetables, the Organic Thelawala initiative gives us the highest satisfaction. We talked about Transparency, Traceability, Sustainability and Livelihoods, to the uninitiated, those sound like jazzy terms, and all those terms converge very nicely into this initiative. So let’s talk more about what and how we are doing.

We launched a push cart. A simple, humble, organic fruits and vegetables push cart (Thallugaadi translates to push cart in Kannada). The cart is the vehicle through which we connect two vulnerable communities: small land-holding farmers & urban distressed street vendors.

In our multi-decade long work with farmers, we recognized early on that we should focus on two problems that are central to their struggle: market linkages and fair prices. We realized that the only way to tackle these problems was to be obsessed with quality. Having trained over 40,000+ farmers, today over 13,000 + farmers in our network grow export quality organic produce. NPOP (National Program for Organic Production) regulations demand that farmers are inspected twice a year, our dedication to quality demands that we inspect farmers 16-24 times per year. We provide organic fruits and vegetables at affordable prices – our most recent benchmark against 5 other organic brands showed that we are 45% cheaper. We also guarantee fresh, everyday. We don’t sell leftovers, ever.

Being a not-for-profit organization, our focus is to increase the share of revenue for the farmer. Our commitment to you is that when you purchase your fruits & vegetables from Organic Thallugaadi, 60% of what you pay goes directly to the farmer’s bank account, the remaining 40% goes towards transportation, salary and administrative costs and wastages.

We strongly believe in the #powerofthecart. One cart alone can:

By the way, although the produce is the real hero of the cart, we have digitally enabled the cart to enable customer delight: The produce of the day can be viewed in real time and ordered via an app, is weighed on a digital weighing machine in front of the customer, and can be tracked via GPS. We have also digitally enabled the entire supply chain for traceability and transparency. This means we are able to tell you from exactly which farmer a particular product came from. We encourage you to call the farmer, view organic inspection reports or better yet, visit the farmer in their field’s. Pushcarts are designed specifically for the sustainability of the corporate campus. They only require 18 square feet of real estate, are modular, dismantlable and movable within minutes. The push-cart initiative is a collaboration of United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and TruTrade Foundation.

Organic Thallugaadi has been deployed within numerous IT corporates, below are some of the photos of the Thallugaadi deployment from different corporates !!!

To find out how you can launch a cart at your campus, please fill out more details on the contact-us page of our website at https://trutrade.org/contact/