It started with a quiet decision.
In August 2019, our founder Rajesh was standing inside a commercial poultry shed on the outskirts of Gurugram. He'd worked in the Indian egg industry for eight years, rising from quality supervisor to regional manager at one of north India's largest producers. On paper, his career was thriving. In practice, something inside him had been fraying for months.
That particular morning, a batch of hens was being "culled" — the industry's polite word for mass disposal. Thirty thousand birds, past their peak laying capacity, rounded up for slaughter in conditions that would shock most Indians if they ever saw them. Rajesh watched for about six minutes. Then he walked out, got into his car, and drove 180 kilometres south to his grandfather's village.
He didn't resign for another fortnight. But the decision was made that morning, in the gravel of that parking lot. He would start again, differently.
A return to Saloni Village.
Saloni is a small village in Mahendragarh district, tucked into the semi-arid southern flank of Haryana where the Aravalli foothills flatten into wheat and mustard fields. Rajesh's grandfather had farmed here; his uncles still did. The family owned five acres of land that had lain partly fallow since the 1990s — a rectangle of brown earth, a few neem trees, a hand-pump, and the horizon of the Aravallis in the distance.
In October 2019, Rajesh sold his two-bedroom flat in Gurugram and used the money to build what he called a "small, stubborn experiment." He erected open-pasture fencing across the full five acres. He constructed four modest barns where hens could sleep at night and lay their eggs in the morning. He bought two hundred Rhode Island Red hens — a heritage breed, not the high-yield commercial strains — and began the slow work of feeding them only what he could source certified-organic.
The first eggs came three weeks later. Rajesh gave them away. To neighbours. To his mother's weekly kitty party. To the village school's midday meal programme. Within a month, people in the village were asking if they could buy them. Within three months, someone from Narnaul — the nearest town — had driven out to place a standing order.
"Mujhe business shuru karne ka plan nahi tha. Mujhe sirf ek acha egg produce karna tha. Business to customers ne banaya."
Rajesh, Founder
Growth, without compromise.
Between 2020 and 2023, Sahya Agro grew from 200 hens to 3,500. The first cold-chain dispatches to Delhi began in early 2021. By mid-2022 we had subscription customers in Mumbai. A chance meeting with a boutique-hotel head chef in Gurugram led to our first B2B contract — and within a year, eight hotels across Delhi-NCR were buying from us regularly.
But the hardest thing about growth, we learned, was not achieving it but resisting the shortcuts that growth invites. Every month brought a new offer: bigger hens that laid faster, cheaper feed from less scrupulous mills, automated collection systems, synthetic yolk enhancers. Every month, we said no. It would have been easier to say yes.
Our commercial model depends on something almost old-fashioned: a customer who notices. We spent almost nothing on advertising for the first three years. What we invested in instead was transparency. Every carton carried the pack date. Every batch was independently lab-tested. Every farm visit request was honoured. Every complaint received a personal WhatsApp response from Rajesh himself — a practice that continued until early 2024, when volume finally made it impossible.
By January 2026, we dispatch forty thousand eggs every morning. We reach 283 Indian cities and 56 Gulf destinations. We supply 53 restaurants and hotels. We employ 34 people — mostly from Saloni and surrounding villages, none of whom previously worked in the poultry industry. And we still haven't used a single antibiotic.
Why we do it this way.
There's an argument often made in the Indian food industry: scale demands compromise. You can't feed a billion people with small farms and hand-collection; economics won't allow it. And we agree — at the very, very large end of the scale. But there's also a middle ground the conversation tends to ignore: the space for medium-sized, values-driven producers who serve customers willing to pay fairly for a better product. That's the space we occupy. We believe it needs more companies in it.
Every egg we ship is a small argument that a different model is possible. It's also, we hope, a small daily pleasure. A yolk the colour of a Haryana sunset. A shell that cracks cleanly. A breakfast that makes you wonder why eggs ever stopped tasting like this.
Welcome to Sahya Agro. We're glad you're here.
