The strangest travel that Puneet Jhajharia remembers is when he visited a village in Arunachal Pradesh — in a car, navigating the river on top of two rowing boats!Over the last two years, Puneet and his business partner Ishira Mehta have travelled almost 70,000 km, across 20 states, looking to meet farmers , develop linkages and get back local, traditional ingredients that may be of interest to consumers in the metros.Both do not have a background in food. But they have an interest in agriculture, a background in corporate business, and “are equally comfortable travelling to remote villages, 10 days a month as they are talking to urban customers”. The last is a valuable skillset.While working for a global fund, with a mandate to invest in areas that could alleviate poverty, Puneet found that while half of the global portfolio for the fund was in agriculture, in India there was not a single “agriculture company that we could invest in”.Ishira, meanwhile, worked with the International Finance Corporation doing pilots, connecting with farmers. Both realised that while the farmers “were doing interesting work and there were companies and businesses in the cities looking for interesting agri products and ingredients, both did not speak the same language. There was a lot of distrust.” So, in 2013, they decided to start up CropConnect , a via media, connecting farmers with urban businesses looking for traditional and healthy food products.“We found that it was the middlemen who were making all the money. We met a group of farmers just half an hour away from Chandigarh, who would hand over all their tomatoes to a middleman, who came with a small truck. He would come back, hand them some money and say, ‘this is the sum I got… and this is your sum after my commission…’ This, when the area is so close to the city.”At the same time, both also realised the importance of sourcing healthy foods — “every farmer we met has separate plots of land, one for friends and family and the other for commercial use… there is indiscriminate use of chemicals”.The startup experiment has now taken the shape of the Original Indian Table, an umbrella brand, which seeks to bring to consumers (both B2B and B2C) traditional foods directly sourced from farms that engage in healthy and safe agricultural practices (not necessarily organic).There are 12 products ready for retail this month onwards — online and in stores in Delhi, initially, including the likes of the white munsiari rajma from Himachal, red rice puffs, garlic rock salt from Uttarakhand, jamun seed powder from Jharkhand, “bamboo-rice” and more.While the B2B business relies on making these products accessible with bakers, restaurants and such, the B2C business is also looking at innovative and engaging formats. The duo, for instance, have created “curated” boxes — each with a theme: Himalayan, Southern, Holi and more.A set of recipes, information about the farmers, and nutritional information supplied alongside the set of six ingredients, retailing at around Rs 1,000 per box. But will the young, urban customers bite?