The highest form of innovation is often a return to tradition.

02 · From the CEO

From retail spaces to substance.

For more than twenty years, my work was about creating places where people gather. With Thakral Corporation in Singapore, IKEA and Ingka Centres, JLL and Cushman & Wakefield, I developed and invested in the retail destinations that shape how communities shop and meet.

Over time I came to see the buildings as only the stage. What mattered was what people carried home: food that nourishes, and products they can trust.

My family’s roots go back three generations in traditional flour milling. Growing up around chakkis taught me that the way food is processed is just as important as the ingredients themselves. Over the decades, methods that preserved nutrition and flavour gave way to industrial processing, in the pursuit of scale and shelf life.

The future of food lies not in producing more, but in producing better.

TrueSubstance was born from the conviction that those time-honoured methods deserve a place in modern retail.

Our first brand, Slomilled Foods, brings stone-milled flours, wood-pressed oils, stone-ground spices, bilona ghee and other minimally processed staples back into the neighbourhood, made in small batches, often in full view of customers.

Our ambition is to keep what is good about these methods while building the systems that let them grow responsibly: generations of milling knowledge, alongside modern quality assurance, efficient supply chains and technology-enabled retail.

Everything we build follows one principle: food should stay as close to its natural form as possible.

Kamal Sehgal