Branded Kumaoni hill-pulse milling & retail brand

Almora's hill villages grow distinctive indigenous pulses — gahat (horse gram), bhatt (black soybean), and masoor — that today sell as undifferentiated bulk despite rising D2C demand for traceable mountain food. This venture sharpens away from the forced handloom-plus-pulse mashup and commits to one thread: a small pulse-mill and retail brand. It builds on the district's hill-horticulture-and-fruit base and the broader Kumaon hill-station identity that lends the brand its provenance story, and it can extend into the hill-fruit gap with jams and dried preserves once the pulse line is stable. The operator runs cleaning, grading, de-stoning, packing, and a tight SKU set sold as single-origin Kumaoni pulses to D2C health-food shoppers and specialty grocers at a clear premium over commodity dal. The honest constraints are supply aggregation across scattered smallholders, FSSAI compliance, grading consistency, and shipping out of hill terrain — provenance branding only earns its premium if grain quality stays uniform batch to batch. The kept payback reflects that brand-build and aggregation ramp. Buyers: urban D2C, organic and specialty grocers, and gifting channels.