Jaggu's honesty test
How to check any jaggery. Including ours.
We'd rather you knew how to catch us out than took our word for it. This is everything we know about spotting adulterated gud, and it works just as well on the block sitting in your kitchen right now.
Start here
The thing almost everyone gets backwards.
Most people reach for the palest, glossiest block on the shelf. That's the one to put down.
Pale, glossy, perfectly even
Sugarcane juice does not naturally produce this. A bright uniform yellow almost always means something was added to lighten it — usually because sellers know shoppers associate pale with pure. The colour is the marketing, not the quality.
Darker, duller, a bit inconsistent
Real gud runs deep amber to brown, with a matte surface and visible variation between batches. Cane changes with the field, the season and the day it was cut. If every block looks identical, someone controlled for that.
What gets added
The list is worse than most people expect.
These have all been documented in adulterated jaggery sold in India. Two are there to change the colour, two to increase the weight.
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Sodium bicarbonate & caustic soda Added to lighten the colour. Baking soda is the most common adulterant of all, and the easiest to detect at home.
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Zinc formaldehyde sulphoxylate A whitening agent borrowed from the textile industry. It has no business anywhere near food.
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Chalk powder / calcium carbonate Bulks out the block so it weighs more on the scale. You are paying jaggery prices for powdered rock.
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Plain sugar powder The irony of buying jaggery to avoid refined sugar, and getting refined sugar mixed into it.
The test
One minute, in your own kitchen.
This is the standard check for carbonate adulterants — the baking soda and chalk group. It's the same principle food safety officers use.
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Crush a small piece
A pinch is plenty. Put it in a glass or a small bowl — something you can see into clearly.
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Add a few drops of dilute hydrochloric acid
Sold in most chemists as dilute HCl. Handle it carefully, keep it away from children, and don't lean over the glass.
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Watch for fizzing
Bubbles mean carbonates — baking soda or chalk powder reacting with the acid to release carbon dioxide. Pure jaggery does not fizz.
No acid to hand? Two rougher checks. Dissolve a spoonful in a glass of water — chalk and other insolubles sink to the bottom rather than dissolving. And taste it: real gud finishes clean, while a salty or faintly bitter edge points to something added.
Turning it on ourselves
What we'll tell you, without being asked.
Sulphur-free
No sulphur and no whitening agents at the kolhu — confirmed with our supplier. That's why our gud is darker than the block next to it.
Where it's from
The sugarcane belt of Uttar Pradesh, inside the Muzaffarnagar GI region. Finished products are made in a licensed food facility.
What we haven't got yet
We're not organic-certified, and we're not yet a registered user of the GI mark. When either changes, it'll say so here.
Batch-level details — harvest month, batch number and lab report — will appear here from our first production run.
Go on then
Test ours first.
Genuinely. If it fizzes, we want to know before you tell anyone else.
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