Hemanth Kumar Srinivas

About Hemanth

Hemanth Kumar Srinivas is the co-founder and managing director of Dhatu Organics and Naturals, a certified organic food brand based in Mysore, Karnataka. He holds a Master's degree from the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, Canada — one of the world's leading research universities in environmental and life sciences. His graduate work gave him a rigorous, systems-level understanding of how industrial food production interacts with ecology, soil health, human nutrition, and long-term environmental sustainability.

After completing his Masters, Hemanth spent approximately six years working as an Environmental Scientist in Canada — assessing ecological impacts, working on resource and land management projects, and developing an increasingly precise picture of how the industrialisation of food systems had begun to cause harm at every level simultaneously: environmental degradation, soil depletion, nutritional destruction, and chronic human disease.

In 2011, he returned to India — not as a tourist returning home, but as a scientist who had spent six years building the evidence and conviction for what he wanted to do next. A year later, in 2012, he co-founded Dhatu Organics with Dr. Mohan Kumar R.K. — a practising oral implantologist in Mysore whose clinical case studies had led him independently to the same conclusion from a completely different vantage point: his patients were developing diabetes, periodontal disease, compromised bone density, and systemic inflammation because of what modern food had become.

The combination of Hemanth's environmental science and food systems expertise with Dr. Mohan's clinical evidence created the founding conviction behind Dhatu: that the food system was broken at its root, and that rebuilding access to genuinely traditional, whole, and minimally processed food was simultaneously a health intervention, an environmental one, and a cultural act of recovery.

Areas of Expertise

• Sustainable food systems & environmental science — graduate-level training from UBC in environmental systems, ecological impact assessment, and the intersection of industrial food production with soil health, water use, and biodiversity
• Sprouted grain nutrition — the biochemistry of germination, antinutrient reduction (phytic acid, tannins), and improved bioavailability of iron, zinc, calcium, and B vitamins through sprouting; Dhatu's sprouting protocol reduces antinutrients by 50–70% before milling
• Cold-pressed oil production — single-pass cold pressing of groundnut, coconut, sesame, and mustard oils; smoke points, fatty acid profiles, and oxidation stability versus heat-processed and solvent-extracted equivalents
• Traditional Indian millets — foxtail, barnyard, kodo, browntop, little, and proso millets: cultivation history, nutritional profiles, glycaemic index, environmental advantages over paddy rice, and culinary uses
• Lacto-fermentation — oil-free and vinegar-free vegetable fermentation using natural lactic acid bacteria; probiotic content, GABA generation, gut microbiome restoration, and the clinical connection to systemic health
• Organic food certification & supply chain — India's NPOP (National Programme for Organic Production) standards; farm audits, input restrictions, and end-to-end traceability from certified organic farms to finished product
• Ayurvedic food science — classical Ayurvedic properties of millets, ragi, ghee, honey, and traditional spices, interpreted alongside and validated by modern nutritional research
• Health content accuracy — reviewing nutrition claims against peer-reviewed literature; all Dhatu blog content cites scientific sources where specific health claims are made

Why Traditional Processing Matters

Hemanth's six years as an Environmental Scientist gave him a systems-level view of why modern industrial food production fails — not just ecologically, but nutritionally. Conventional milling generates heat up to 80–100°C, destroying heat-sensitive B vitamins and antioxidants. Refining strips away the bran and germ — where most fibre, minerals, and phytonutrients are concentrated. Bleaching, sulphuring, hydrogenation, and chemical preservation introduce compounds with no nutritional function and documented negative effects on gut microbiome diversity.

When he met Dr. Mohan Kumar R.K. on returning to India in 2011, he found in him a clinician who had arrived at identical conclusions from patient data: the diseases filling Dr. Mohan's dental clinic — the diabetic patients with failing implants, the patients with aggressive gum disease, the slow-healing surgical sites — traced back, consistently, to modern food. Two perspectives — one scientific, one clinical — pointing at the same root cause.

Dhatu's work is built on the opposite of industrial food logic: food processed as little as necessary, using methods validated by centuries of Indian culinary and medicinal tradition — and now supported by a growing body of peer-reviewed nutritional science.

"The question we ask about every product is not 'how long can it last on a shelf?' but 'how much of the grain's original nutrition reaches the person eating it?' Sprouting, cold-milling, and lacto-fermentation are the answers our ancestors found to that question. We are making them available at scale, without compromise."— Hemanth Kumar Srinivas, Co-Founder, Dhatu Organics

The Dhatu Co-Founding Story

Dhatu Organics was founded in 2012 by Hemanth Kumar Srinivas and Dr. Mohan Kumar R.K. — two people who had arrived at the same diagnosis from different directions. Hemanth brought the environmental science framework: a systems understanding of soil, supply chains, organic certification, and what "organic" actually means beyond a label. Dr. Mohan brought the clinical evidence: years of patient case studies documenting the human cost of a food system optimised for shelf life over nutrition.

Their initial idea was organic farming — to grow the food themselves and control every input. But as the concept evolved, they recognised a more urgent and scalable problem: India's organic farmers existed, the knowledge of traditional food preparation existed, but the bridge between those farmers and urban consumers did not. Dhatu was built to be that bridge.

Starting as a single organic store in Mysore in 2012, Dhatu now operates certified organic processing facilities, retail stores in Mysore and Whitefield Bangalore, and an online store shipping across India. Every product in the Dhatu range — the sprouted flours, the cold-pressed oils, the whole millets, the Ayurvedic wellness drinks, the lacto-fermented pickles — is traceable to certified organic farms and made without additives, preservatives, or artificial ingredients of any kind.

Dhatu Organics

Dhatu Organics operates certified organic processing facilities and restaurant stores in Mysore and Whitefield, Bangalore. All products ship across India with free delivery above ₹499. The range covers sprouted flours, whole millets, heirloom rice varieties, cold-pressed oils, traditional ghees, lacto-fermented pickles, unrefined sweeteners, Ayurvedic wellness drinks, and single-origin spices.