MAKHANZA is a makhana company. Not a snack company that happens to sell makhana — a company built around one seed, and what can honestly be made from it.
Who we are
MAKHANZA is a brand of RASI Lifestyle, founded and run by Ramkumar from Chennai. Everything we sell is made in our own FSSAI-certified kitchen in Ramapuram, and every batch is lab-tested at an NABL-accredited laboratory before it is packed.
Our FSSAI registration number is 22426072000851. It is printed on every pack and stated on every page of this site, because a food company that is hard to identify is a food company you should not buy from.
Where the makhana comes from
Makhana is the seed of a water lily, Euryale ferox. It grows at the bottom of ponds in Bihar, and it is harvested by hand — divers going down repeatedly through the mud, collecting seeds one pass at a time. The seeds are then dried, roasted in hot sand, and popped by hand with a wooden mallet.
Almost none of that has been mechanised. It is slow, skilled work done by farming families who have done it for generations, and it is the reason makhana costs what it costs. When we say honest harvest, this is what we mean.
We buy graded seed directly, and we grade again ourselves. Bigger pops mean older, better seed, and a crunch that survives the journey to your kitchen.
What we make
Six products, all built on the same seed:
- Premium Phool Makhana — hand-graded, roasted in small batches, nothing added but heat. 9.7g protein per 100g and 0.1g fat.
- Makhana Noodles with Masala — instant noodles at 12.46g protein per 100g, with a masala blend we developed ourselves.
- Makhana Pasta with Masala — our highest-protein pack, 13.76g per 100g.
- Makhana Cookies — baked with makhana instead of refined wheat, 8.2g protein per 100g.
- Makhanza Bites — five flavours in single-serve packs, for the times a big pouch is the wrong answer.
- Little Sprout — a makhana and millet mix carrying DHA from a vegan algal source.
On DHA and fortification
Most DHA in the food supply comes from fish oil. Ours does not. We use an algal-source DHA developed with Primas Bioscience, which means it is suitable for vegetarians and vegans, and it carries none of the marine taste that makes fish-oil fortification so difficult to hide in food.
It is also thermostable above 180°C, which is the part that actually matters. A great many fortified foods lose the nutrient they are fortified with during baking. Ours survives the oven, which is why we can put it in a cookie rather than only in a cold mix.
Our fortification work sits in a pipeline of products still in development. We will publish the numbers for each as it is tested, not before.
What we will not do
We do not make health claims we cannot substantiate. Under FSSAI’s Advertising and Claims Regulations, statements about immunity, weight loss, diabetes or heart health are regulated claims requiring evidence held on file — so we state nutrient values and let you draw your own conclusions.
We do not publish reviews we did not receive. When you see a rating on this site, someone bought the product and wrote it.
And we publish the arithmetic behind our numbers. The energy value on our makhana, for instance, is 318 kcal per 100g rather than the 347 kcal quoted across the internet — because Indian labelling rules count dietary fibre at 2 kcal/g and makhana is unusually high in fibre. The working is shown.
Where we sell
We ship across India from Chennai. Delivery is free on orders over ₹499, and every price shown on this site already includes GST — what you see is what you pay.
We also work with retailers and distributors across Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. If you would like to stock MAKHANZA, the distribution page is the place to start, and there are separate routes for export and affiliates.
Talk to us
The fastest route is email — info@makhanza.co.in — or the contact page, which has everything including the address.