Why I Built TaruLease: My Grandfather's Orchard, and the Middlemen in Between

My grandfather, Rajamallu, was eight years old the first time his father walked him into the orchard and said, "watch the trees, they will tell you everything." That was more than forty years ago. He has not stopped watching since. This is the story of why that orchard in Telangana, and one thing that always bothered him about it, became TaruLease.

Forty years of watching trees

Nobody taught my grandfather from a book. He learned by being there, season after season. He knows which branch to prune and which one to leave alone. He knows when a tree is thirsty before it shows any sign. He can tell a Banganapalli from an Imam Pasand by the shape of the leaf, and he can tell you a mango is two days from ready by the way it sits on the branch.

You cannot learn that in a classroom. It takes years of standing in an orchard and paying attention. He still walks the rows before sunrise every morning and checks on every tree the way you check on someone in your family. He knows when each one was planted and the year it gave its best yield.

The part that always hurt

Here is the thing that bothered him for most of his life. He grew the fruit, and strangers decided what it was worth.

Every harvest, traders would come to the orchard, look at what he had spent an entire season caring for, name a price, and leave. He had no real choice. His mangoes would end up in some city market five hundred kilometres away, selling for three times what he received, and he would never know who ate them.

He kept farming because he loves the work. But that part always hurt. A man can spend forty years learning to read a tree, and still have no say in what his fruit is worth or where it ends up.

What I built, and why

I am his grandson. I built TaruLease for one simple reason: so he could sell directly to the people who actually eat his trees' fruit.

Now, when the mangoes are ready, they go from his orchard to your doorstep in three to seven days. No warehouse. No carbide to force-ripen them. No trader standing between us. When someone leases a tree from him or orders a box, he knows their name. He told me that means something to him, and I believe him.

That is the whole idea. Take out the middle, and two things happen. The farmer finally gets a fair share of what his fruit is worth. And you get fruit that was picked at the right moment and sent straight to you, not something that sat in cold storage while its value was marked up three times.

Why this shows up in everything we send

People ask why we do gifting the way we do, why we hand-write the recipient's name on a card, why we stand behind every box in writing, why we would rather deliver to one office ourselves than hand it to a chain of warehouses.

The honest answer is that it comes from the same place as the orchard. "I know your name" is not a marketing line for us. It is how my grandfather has always thought about the people who eat his fruit, and it is the standard I wanted the whole business to run on, whether it is a single mango box going to a home in Mumbai or a hundred baskets going to a company for Diwali. We wrote more about that shift in gifting in a new perspective on corporate gifting.

Come see it for yourself

If you want to understand any of this, come visit. My grandfather will walk you through the orchard himself. He will show you how he reads a tree, how he knows when the fruit is ready, and why these mangoes taste different from what you find in the city. He has been doing this for forty years and he never gets tired of talking about it.

Most of what we sell is simple: real fruit, sent directly, from a family that has done this a long time. That is the whole story, and it is enough.

Want fruit from the orchard, or a gift with a real origin behind it? See our corporate gifting baskets → | Visit Rajamallu's farm →