How a simple question — 'why can't we find pure honey anymore?' — sparked a movement.
It started with a simple question that Aryan Singh, DVISSA's founder, asked his grandmother one afternoon in 2018: 'Why does store-bought honey taste so different from what we used to get from the forest?' His grandmother, who had grown up near the Champaran forests of Bihar, explained that the honey they knew was collected by tribal communities who had spent generations learning the rhythms of the forest — when the flowers bloom, how the bees migrate, which hives to harvest and which to leave untouched.
That conversation stayed with Aryan. Back in his city apartment, surrounded by supermarket shelves lined with identical golden jars, he started researching. What he found was alarming: a 2018 food safety report suggested that a majority of commercial honey brands contained added sugars, syrups, or antibiotics. The product that had been a pillar of Indian wellness for thousands of years had become an industrial commodity — often barely honey at all.
Aryan spent six months travelling through the forests of Bihar and Jharkhand, meeting beekeeping communities, learning how they harvest, and understanding what makes forest honey fundamentally different from factory-processed alternatives. He met families like the Mahatos in Palamu, who had been practicing cliff-face honey gathering for over three generations. He met Santali women in Saranda who could identify a queen bee's hive by sound alone.
In late 2018, Aryan made a decision: he would build a company whose entire reason for existence was to bring this authentic, pure forest honey directly to Indian homes — without ever compromising on quality. DVISSA was incorporated in January 2019. The name comes from an old Sanskrit root meaning 'without compromise'. It was a mission statement as much as a brand name.
The first year was humbling. Finding beekeepers who trusted an outsider, building cold chain logistics from remote forest areas to urban consumers, convincing early customers to pay a premium for honey that 'looked different' — it was harder than Aryan had imagined. But by December 2019, DVISSA had fulfilled its first 500 orders. Each jar came with a handwritten note from the beekeeper family that produced it.
"We didn't want to build another honey brand. We wanted to build the last honest honey brand India would ever need."