Why I Came Home From India Wanting Australia to See What I See
I believe the people who show up for an industry, quietly, year after year, deserve to have their work seen.
I've just come home from India, where I sat in a room full of exactly those people. Government officials, accreditation bodies, farmers, exporters, scientists, all gathered for the International Organic Buyer Seller Meet in Tripura. I was invited by IFOAM Asia to attend two conferences on this trip, the BioFach expo in Delhi and the buyer-seller meet in Tripura, and for 10 days I got to watch, up close, just how seriously India treats organic integrity. Not as a marketing word. As a whole system, built and rebuilt over more than two decades, by people who genuinely believe in it.
Something shifted in me in that room. I didn't just leave inspired. I left feeling like I had a job to do.
A system most of us have never heard of
Love My Earth has sourced ingredients from India since the day I launched, and that connection has always been personal to me, not just a supply line. But even after all these years, sitting through those sessions taught me things about the architecture behind that little word "organic" on an Indian product that I didn't fully understand before.
There's a national programme called NPOP, running since 2001 and now in its eighth edition, where certification bodies are independently audited by a national accreditation body. Not self-declared. Third-party verified, at every level. There's a traceability system called Tracenet, India was the first country in the world to launch one, that issues QR-coded certificates so a product can be traced right back through the chain it came from. There are real conversion periods, two to three years, before land can even be called organic, same as anywhere else in the world.
And since September 2025, there's a mutual recognition arrangement between India and Australia. Our own government already recognises India's organic certification as equivalent to ours.
That one stopped me in my tracks a little. Australia trusts this system at a government level. So why hasn't that trust reached the shelf?
The resistance I keep noticing
In fourteen years of doing this work, I've felt it. A quiet hesitation from Australian shoppers around organic products from India. Local feels verified. Imported feels uncertain. I understand where it comes from. But sitting in that room in Tripura, surrounded by people whose entire careers are built on getting this right, I felt how little that hesitation has to do with the actual work being done.
The infrastructure is there. The audits, the accreditation, the traceability, the testing, the government agreements. It just hasn't been translated into something a person can see or feel while they're standing in front of a shelf.
There is some exciting work to be done in Australia, with consumers, buyers and manufacturers alike. How can we give people more confidence when they look to India for organic ingredients?
Why I'm sharing this
India continues to give me so much. The inspiration for this whole business, the relationships, recipe and product inspiration, the way of cooking and living that shaped who I am. Coming home from India, I felt a genuine pull to use whatever small platform I have to help tell that story properly.
I want to be clear about something too. I'm just as passionate about Australian ingredients, always have been. But we can't grow everything here. Some things simply belong to another soil, another climate, another set of hands who've been perfecting them for generations.
So consider this the start of it. More stories are coming, the people, the farms, the process behind what already sits on your shelf from us. I think once you can see what's really standing behind that word "organic" from India, the hesitation softens on its own.
If anyone has questions, I'm always happy to have the conversation.
Heart Inspired, always,
Jess