The press began in a shed at the edge of Bareilly, in Uttar Pradesh, in 1965. A wooden ghaani, the kind that took two men to set turning, drawing oil from mustard seed cold and slow. The family bought it second-hand, rebuilt the bullock harness, and pressed the first batch in a leased shed at the edge of the town. The bottles were glass. The labels were hand-lettered.
The family outgrew the Bareilly shed in the 1980s. A second mill opened in Ratlam, Madhya Pradesh, to handle the rising volumes — same wooden-ghaani method, more sorting bays, a proper bottling line. The Ratlam mill ran through the 1980s and 1990s; the Bareilly shed kept turning alongside, for the family’s own batches.
In 2011 the family consolidated the Rajasthan kitchen-oil operation — mustard, groundnut, and sesame — into a purpose-built mill. Same wooden-ghaani method. Bigger sorting bays, batch quarantine rooms, FSSAI-grade traceability on every batch. Deepam remained separate, blended for the lamp and bottled away from the edible oils. The Rajasthan mill does in a week what the original Bareilly shed used to do in a month, but the temperature is still under 30°C and the seed is still single-source.
Coconut has its own home. We have always pressed it in Kerala, on the coast where the copra is dried and the trees grow within sight of the sea. That has not changed since coconut joined the catalogue in 1996.
The original Bareilly shed is still there. The wooden ghaani inside it has been rebuilt four times — the wood replaced piece by piece, the way the family will replace it again when the time comes. The bullock was retired in 1981 in favour of a low-RPM electric motor; that was the largest single change the press has accepted. Once a month, on the first Monday, the family runs the original ghaani for their own household supply. The mustard for that batch is the year’s first. The seed is the variety the press began with. The hands are the third generation.
This is not romanticism. The slow press is not slower because it is more authentic; it is slower because the oil is better. Heat above 60°C oxidises the unsaturated fats, drives off the volatile aromatics, breaks the natural antioxidants. Cold-press is what every other manufacturer once did, before the industrial revolution made it cheaper not to. Bharat is one of the houses that refused.
What the press makes
Mustard came first, in 1965. Groundnut in 1972. Deepam, the lamp oil, in 1987. Sesame in 1993. Coconut in 1996. The cooking oils each come from a single source — mustard from the Doab seed varieties pressed at the Rajasthan mill, groundnut from a Gujarat supplier likewise, sesame from a Madhya Pradesh cooperative likewise, coconut from the Kerala coast pressed at our coastal facility. The deepam blend is the family’s formula, mixed in a room separate from the kitchen oils so the two are never confused.
The bottling line is small — three filling stations, two label machines, and a manual seal check. A bottle that does not pass the seal check is opened, the oil returned to the day’s batch, the bottle washed and refilled. There is no waste; there is no margin for it.
The audit decade
The 2000s changed what the press did on paper, not in practice. FSSAI compliance, ISO 22000, the export-grade audits required for shipments to the UAE — all of these came in. The press did not change what it did; the paperwork around it did. The family hired a quality officer in 2004. She is still here.
The first export shipment left for the UAE in 2007 — a single pallet of mustard oil for an Indian grocer in Sharjah. He had moved from Pune the year before and asked his mother for the oil she used. She named us. He called the office. The pallet went out on a Tuesday.
The diaspora found us
The Amazon.ae listing went up in 2018. The orders came not in pallets but in single bottles — one family at a time, in Sharjah, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Al Ain. The press kept doing what it had always done. The world reached out to it.
Today the third generation runs the company. They have engineering degrees, MBAs, opinions about supply-chain software. They have not changed the press. They have only moved it under bigger roofs.
Sixty years. One promise.
