Yemmiganur, Kurnool district
A trading counter before it was ever a kitchen
Dhanya Lakshmi Traders has bought and sold groundnut out of Yemmiganur since 2006 — long before Yellipayakaram was a brand on a shelf. This is the short version of how a trading business ended up grinding its own podi.
The trading years
Yemmiganur sits in a stretch of Kurnool district that has traded groundnut and chilli for generations. Our counter opened in 2006, buying kernel from farmers within a day’s cart ride, grading it, and selling it on. It is unglamorous work — weighing sacks, arguing over moisture content, knowing which farmer’s crop is worth a premium — but it teaches you exactly where your raw material comes from, because you’re the one standing in the yard when it arrives.
That habit — knowing the source, not just the invoice — is the only reason the podi business works the way it does today.
Why we started grinding
Every trading family in Yemmiganur grinds podi at home — it is what you do with the kernel that does not make the grade for sale, and what you feed people who visit. Ours kept getting asked for more of it than we could give away. Packaging some of it properly, with an actual FSSAI licence and a batch code instead of a reused steel tin, was the obvious next step once enough people had asked.
We did not change suppliers or start buying from a mandi we didn’t already know. The podi is made from the same kernel the trading counter has always handled — we just stopped selling all of it raw.
How it’s actually made
~20 kg
Per grinding batch — small enough to sell out and grind again, not stockpile
Stone
Ground coarse on a stone wheel, not a high-speed steel blade that cooks the oil out of the spice
1 batch
One lot code per grinding run, printed on every pack it fills
Kernel and chilli are cleaned and roasted the same week they’re ground — never stockpiled raw for months waiting for an order. The stone wheel runs slower and hotter blades don’t, which matters for anything with garlic or oil-rich groundnut in it: heat from a fast steel grinder cooks the oil and dulls the smell before the jar is even sealed.
Small batches mean the podi in a pack today was very likely ground within the last one to two weeks, not pulled off a warehouse shelf. Scan the QR code on the back of any pack and you can check the exact batch, grind date, and best-before date for yourself — see a product page for an example, or read a batch record directly at /trace/<batch code>.
Still in Yemmiganur
We are not a factory with a story bolted on afterwards. The trading counter, the grinding room, and the packing table are all in the same town, mostly run by the same handful of people who know each other’s families. If something goes wrong with a batch, there is no call centre between you and the person who ground it — you can reach us directly on WhatsApp at +916301655510.