The Jaggery Project

It starts in a sugarcane field. It ends in your hand. Nothing else gets added in between.

Jaggery is one of the oldest foods in the world, and the way it’s made hasn’t changed much in thousands of years. No factory required. No chemistry. Just heat and patience.

Step 1: Harvest the sugarcane

Sugarcane is a tall grass that takes 10–14 months to mature. When it’s ready, it’s cut by hand — close to the ground, where the sugar concentration is highest. Timing matters. Harvest too early and the juice is thin. Too late and the sugar starts converting to fiber.

For organic jaggery, the cane is grown without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers. The fields are audited. The soil is tested. This part of the process is invisible in the final product, but it’s the foundation of everything.

Step 2: Extract the juice

The cut cane is fed through a crusher — either a traditional ox-powered press or a mechanical one. What comes out is raw sugarcane juice: pale green, frothy, and incredibly sweet. This is the same juice you see at street stalls across India, served fresh over ice.

At this point, the juice contains everything the cane had — water, sugar, minerals (iron, magnesium, potassium), and flavor compounds. The goal of making jaggery is to remove the water and keep everything else.

Step 3: Boil

The juice goes into large, shallow pans over an open fire. It’s heated slowly and stirred continuously. As the water evaporates, the juice thickens. Impurities rise to the surface and are skimmed off.

This is where the craft happens. The person making the jaggery watches the color change — from pale to golden to deep amber. They test the consistency by dropping a small amount into cold water. Too early and it won’t set. Too late and it becomes brittle and loses flavor.

The boiling takes several hours. The entire time, someone is watching and stirring.

Step 4: Pour and set

When the consistency is right, the hot liquid is poured into molds — traditionally flat trays or round forms. As it cools, it solidifies into the dense, warm-colored blocks that people have been eating for millennia.

The color, texture, and flavor of the final jaggery depend on everything that came before: the cane variety, the soil, the harvest timing, the boiling duration, and the skill of the maker.

Step 5: Shape and wrap

For The Jaggery Project, there’s one more step. The jaggery is portioned into small, bite-sized pieces — about 40 calories each — and individually wrapped. This is the part Abhinav Tyagi designed for American coffee drinkers: portable, clean, and ready to eat alongside your morning cup.

From sugarcane field to wrapped bite, nothing is added. No preservatives, no flavoring, no coloring. Just sugarcane, heat, and time.

That’s it. That’s how jaggery is made. Try it with your morning coffee — 40 calories, organic, individually wrapped.