Every Keralite has a memory of upperi. Not the packet kind — the real kind. The ones that came out of the kitchen during Onam, stacked in a steel bowl at the sadya table, or passed around in an old tin at someone's house after tea. Thin, golden, impossibly crisp. You always reached for one more.

We grew up with that chip. We knew exactly what it was supposed to taste like.

When we started looking for it in a packet — really looking — we kept finding something close, but not quite right. The wrong oil. An ingredient list that went on longer than it should. A flavour that tasted manufactured rather than made. The chip everyone remembered was somehow missing from every shelf we checked.

So in June 2025, we decided to make it ourselves.

Not to reinvent it. Not to modernise it or add a twist it didn't need. Just to make the chip we already knew — with Nendran bananas, because that's the variety that fries right. With rice bran oil, because it gives the crunch without the weight. With real spices when the flavour called for them. And with nothing else.

By November, the manufacturing agreement was signed. By December, all five flavours had been independently tested by an NABL-accredited laboratory. By the time the first pack left the warehouse in Kochi, every single ingredient on the label had earned its place there.

That's the whole story. The chip that was missing is back on the shelf.