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Frozen food has a perception problem. We have heard this surprisingly often: “Why should I buy frozen rotis? Isn’t flour fresher?” It sounds logical. Fresh must be better. Frozen must mean old. And something that lasts longer must surely contain more chemicals. Except, scientifically, almost the opposite is true. We freeze Ruby Roti because we wanted to avoid relying on preservatives and stabilisers to keep it usable for longer. The freezer is not the problem. It is part of the solution. First: frozen does not mean stale Freezing is one of humanity’s oldest preservation techniques. At sufficiently low temperatures, microbial growth essentially stops. The microorganisms are not necessarily killed, which is why hygienic manufacture, correct cooking and maintaining the cold chain still matter—but freezing dramatically slows the processes that make food spoil. Think about what your freezer at home already contains. Ice cream. Frozen peas. Ginger-garlic paste. Tamarind. Ice cubes. Nobody looks suspiciously at an ice cube and says, “But is this water fresh?” Somehow, when the same preservation principle is applied to a roti, we suddenly become philosophical. If your definition of acceptable food is that it must have been made immediately before you eat it, you may eventually have to move next to a farm. For everyone else, preservation technology exists for a reason. Myth 1: “Freezing destroys the nutrition” It doesn’t. The US FDA states that freezing does not reduce nutrients and causes little change in the protein value of foods. Research comparing frozen and refrigerated produce has similarly found that nutrient retention is generally comparable. Freezing is fundamentally very different from stripping a food apart, refining it repeatedly and rebuilding it using industrial ingredients. It is primarily temperature control. And rapid freezing has another advantage: smaller ice crystals are formed, helping preserve food quality and texture better than slow freezing. That is why Ruby Roti is rapidly frozen after manufacture and then kept within a cold chain until it reaches you. Myth 2: “Frozen means ultra-processed” No. A freezer does not magically turn food into an ultra-processed food. Even under the widely used NOVA classification, frozen fruit, vegetables, pulses and meats can sit within the unprocessed or minimally processed category. What matters far more is what has been done to the food and what has been put into it. That distinction matters. When developing Ruby Roti, one of our biggest technical challenges was achieving the characteristics people expect from a proper Indian roti: thinness, uniformity, clean edges, flexibility and, most importantly, the ability to puff like a phulka. That is particularly difficult in a gluten-free, extremely low glycemic index and load dough. Our solution was not simply to keep adding ingredients until the dough behaved itself. The engineer founders behind Navrelia developed a manufacturing process to achieve the required structure at scale. Our philosophy has been to derive the food primarily from grains and seeds themselves rather than build a roti around a long list of functional additives. Processing is not automatically bad. Grinding grain is processing. Making yoghurt is processing. Cooking dal is processing. Freezing vegetables is processing. The more useful question is: What are we processing, why are we processing it, and what has been added along the way? Myth 3: “Freezing will increase the GI” There is no scientific basis for assuming that simply freezing a food makes its glycaemic response worse. In fact, starch chemistry can become rather interesting after cooking, cooling, freezing and reheating. A small human study examining white bread found that freezing and defrosting actually reduced the post-meal glucose response compared with fresh bread under some conditions. Changes in starch structure and retrogradation are thought to contribute. That doesn’t mean freezing magically turns every carbohydrate into a low-GI food. It means something much simpler: “Frozen = higher GI” is a NOT TRUE. A food’s glycaemic effect depends predominantly on its carbohydrate composition, structure, fibre, processing, portion size and the meal in which it is eaten—not merely on whether it has spent time in a freezer. The amount of work required to make something effortless There is a certain irony to Ruby Roti. A great deal of technology goes into making it look as though very little happened. We had to work out how to make a gluten-free dough behave like a familiar Indian roti. How to produce consistently thin rotis. How to create clean edges. How to make them puff. How to preserve texture. How to package them. We use specialised multi-layer barrier packaging designed to protect the product during frozen storage. The rotis are rapidly frozen. The cold chain then has to be maintained through storage, transport and delivery. All of this effort has one purpose: so that the effort required in your kitchen is approximately two minutes with to eat a roti that supports your health like none other. No kneading. No rolling. No wondering what to cook. No specialist recipe. Freezer → pan → plate. That is what convenience food should mean. But surely a freshly made hot roti is better? Possibly. But here is the more important question: Freshly made where, by whom, from what, and under what conditions? During our own journey we have visited commercial roti-making facilities. A roti can emerge piping hot from a machine and still tell you remarkably little about what happened before it reached that machine. How clean was the environment? How were the ingredients stored? How was the dough handled? Who handled it? What quality controls existed? “Hot” and “fresh” are not synonyms for “healthy” or “hygienic.” Sometimes what we cannot see deserves considerably more scrutiny than the freezer we can. Convenience is not the enemy of health This may be the bigger lesson. We often treat healthy eating as though inconvenience proves virtue. Soaking. Grinding. Kneading. Rolling. Cooking every meal from scratch. Wonderful—if you have the time and inclination. Most people also have jobs, children, commutes, night shifts, ageing parents, travel, meetings and lives. A dietary recommendation that works only when somebody has an hour available to cook every meal is not a particularly scalable public-health intervention. For metabolic health, the food you can consistently put on your plate matters more than the theoretically perfect meal you never have time to make. That was the purpose of pressed frozen Ruby Roti. Take a food designed to have a very low glycaemic impact, meaningful protein and fibre, and make eating it almost embarrassingly easy. Two minutes. Perhaps we need to rethink what “fresh” really means There are sensible reasons to scrutinise packaged food. Read the ingredient list. Look at its nutritional composition. Ask why additives are present. Understand how it was manufactured. Check whether its health claims are backed by evidence. But rejecting a product simply because it is frozen is not nutritional wisdom. It is a belief. And sometimes our beliefs about food prevent us from using technologies that were invented precisely to make food safer, more practical and longer-lasting without unnecessarily changing what is in it. So the next time you hear: “Frozen? No, I want fresh.” Perhaps ask a different question. Fresh what? Because a carefully manufactured, rapidly frozen roti with a controlled ingredient list may be a considerably more intelligent choice than something that happens to be warm, cheap and freshly rolled. The freezer isn’t the villain. Sometimes it is what allows us to keep the unnecessary things out.  

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Walk through an Indian supermarket today and rice seems to have acquired a medical degree. There is low-GI rice.Diabetic rice.Sugar-control rice.Sometimes even “sugar-free rice.” That last one is particularly clever. Because ordinary rice does not contain spoonfuls of table sugar either. The real story of low-GI rice is much more interesting — and much less magical. It started with genuine agricultural science At the Rice Research Centre of Professor Jayashankar Telangana State Agricultural University in Rajendranagar, Hyderabad, breeders began developing a new rice variety in 2006. They crossed two established varieties, MTU 1010 and JGL 3855, using conventional pedigree breeding. The resulting variety was RNR-15048, later named Telangana Sona. So this is not an ancient native rice variety suddenly rediscovered, and it is also misleading to think of the rice sold today as an F1 “hybrid rice”. It is a stable, conventionally bred variety derived from a cross. The original goals were largely agricultural: a short-duration, high-yielding, fine-grained rice with good cooking quality and resistance to disease. Telangana Sona was released in 2015 and officially notified in 2016. Then researchers discovered something commercially much more exciting. Its glycaemic index was relatively low. In a published study involving 54 healthy adults, RNR-15048 had a GI of: 51.72 ± 3.39 compared with 73.4 ± 7.79 for the comparator white rice. And a new retail category was born: “Diabetic rice.” But 51.72 is only just inside the low-GI category GI is usually classified as: Low: 55 or belowMedium: 56–69High: 70 or above So yes — 51.72 qualifies as low GI. But look where it sits. Only a few points below the boundary. And the reported result was 51.72 ± 3.39, not simply an immutable number of 51.72. That ±3.39 should not be interpreted as proving that different commercial packets range between particular GI values — it describes uncertainty/variability around the study estimate. But it is a useful reminder that GI is a biological measurement, not an engraving on a rice grain. There is no metabolic cliff between GI 54 and GI 56. Yet commercially, one can carry LOW GI prominently on the packet while the other cannot. That distinction can look much bigger in the supermarket than it really is physiologically. And then comes the awkward number nobody puts on the front of the packet: GL The original RNR-15048 experiment gave participants enough rice to provide 50 g of available carbohydrate — around 226 g of cooked rice. Glycaemic load takes into account both GI and the amount of carbohydrate eaten. Using the study’s own numbers: GL = 51.72 × 50 ÷ 100 = 25.9 A glycaemic load of: 10 or less = low11–19 = medium20 or more = high So the original experimental meal was simultaneously: LOW GI and HIGH GL That is not a contradiction. GI asks roughly how rapidly a carbohydrate-containing food raises glucose relative to a reference. GL asks how much glycaemic impact you get after considering the amount of carbohydrate you actually ate. And this matters enormously with rice. A bowl of low-GI rice is still predominantly starch. Low GI does not mean low carbohydrate. Low GI does not mean low glycaemic load. And it certainly does not mean no glucose spike. Then we met the hawk-eyed customers Most customers will never discover this distinction. They see LOW GI, DIABETIC FRIENDLY or SUGAR CONTROL, eat their rice and reasonably assume the product is doing what those words imply. Perhaps 99% will never measure their glucose afterwards. One of our customers did. They wore a continuous glucose monitor and noticed that an unnamed brand of commercially sold low-GI rice produced a much larger glucose excursion than their usual basmati rice. That is one individual’s observation — not a clinical trial. But it raised an obvious question: What exactly was inside that packet? Later, we spoke to a trader involved in the low-GI rice business who told us that adulteration was an acknowledged problem within the supply chain. He described one commercial batch marketed as low-GI rice which, when reportedly sent for testing, returned a GI of approximately 64. Again, that anecdote does not prove that every low-GI rice is adulterated. But it raises a very legitimate consumer question: If the published science was performed on genetically defined RNR-15048, how do you know every grain in a commercial bag is actually RNR-15048? Premium rice attracts a premium price. Mixing it with cheaper conventional varieties — whether deliberately or somewhere through a complicated supply chain — changes what eventually reaches the customer’s plate. The rice grains themselves do not come with identity cards. Then there is another question: what exactly is a ₹4,000 “GI test”? A trader also mentioned GI testing costing only a few thousand rupees. That should immediately prompt another question: What kind of test? A proper human GI determination is not simply a laboratory placing rice into a machine and printing a number. Standard human GI methodology involves volunteers arriving fasted, consuming a portion containing a defined quantity of available carbohydrate, repeated reference-glucose measurements and multiple blood glucose measurements over approximately two hours. There are also in-vitro starch digestion tests that can produce an estimated GI. Those may be useful as laboratory screening tools. But an estimated GI is not the same thing as a properly performed human GI study. So before accepting “GI tested” on a packet, consumers should be asking: Where was it tested? Was it tested in humans? What methodology was used? Was the commercial product tested — or is the manufacturer quoting research performed years ago on the original rice variety? And perhaps most importantly: Was this particular batch ever tested at all? What about the nutrition? RNR-15048 is an interesting rice variety, but it has not suddenly become a protein-rich, fibre-rich superfood. It is still fundamentally polished rice. Its principal advantage is its starch characteristics and resulting lower measured GI — not a dramatic transformation in its protein, fibre or micronutrient content. So paying a substantial premium makes sense only if the product genuinely contains the claimed variety and the lower glycaemic response matters to you. And then we reach “sugar-free rice” This may be the most misleading phrase of all. Rice contains very little simple sugar. But it contains plenty of starch. Your digestive system breaks that starch down into glucose. So a product can be technically very low in “sugars” on a nutrition label and still produce a substantial rise in blood glucose. The consumer with diabetes does not read SUGAR FREE and think: “Excellent — this food contains little mono- and disaccharide.” They are much more likely to think: “This won’t increase my blood sugar.” Those are completely different statements. And FSSAI is becoming increasingly interested in misleading claims This is unlikely to remain merely an academic debate. FSSAI already prohibits misleading food advertisements and claims, and its Advertising and Claims Regulations place restrictions on claims implying that foods can prevent, treat or cure diseases. It has previously taken action against food businesses over misleading health and product claims, including claims involving staple foods. In 2025, FSSAI also strengthened mechanisms allowing consumers to report misleading claims on packaged foods through its app and portal, while separately warning food businesses against other potentially misleading front-of-pack terminology such as sweeping “100%” claims. That makes increasingly aggressive language around products such as rice — “reverses diabetes”, “controls diabetes”, “diabetic rice”, “sugar-free” — an area manufacturers would be wise to watch carefully. There is an enormous difference between saying: “This particular rice variety has demonstrated a lower GI in a human study.” and suggesting: “Eat this rice and reverse your diabetes.” One is a scientific statement. The other is a medical promise. So what rice should you eat? There is no single GI for “rice”. The glycaemic response varies with the cultivar, amylose content, processing, cooking time, portion size and even what happens to the rice after cooking. Studies of commercially available rice have found GI values ranging from 37 to 92. Basmati can sometimes perform surprisingly well. One multicentre Indian study, for example, found a thermally treated basmati rice to have a GI below 55. Cooling rice is also interesting. When cooked rice is refrigerated, some of its starch retrogrades and becomes resistant starch. In one study of people with type 1 diabetes, rice cooled for 24 hours and reheated produced a significantly smaller post-meal glucose rise than freshly cooked rice. That does not turn yesterday’s rice into a diabetes medicine either. It simply illustrates how much the glucose response depends on more than the name of the grain. Rice: GI versus GL The bottom line RNR-15048 is a genuine and interesting piece of Indian agricultural science. The problem begins when “GI 51.72 ± 3.39” becomes “diabetic rice.” And then “diabetic rice” becomes: “sugar free” or “controls diabetes” or, worse, “reverses diabetes.” A GI of 51.72 is a scientific measurement. “Diabetic rice” is a marketing interpretation of that measurement. And perhaps the most revealing fact is the one you are unlikely to see in large letters on the packet: The original RNR-15048 study meal was low GI — but high GL. So if you have diabetes and choose to eat rice, by all means consider a genuinely lower-GI variety. But don’t surrender your common sense at the supermarket shelf. Check the portion. Check the source. Check the testing. And occasionally, if you have a glucometer or CGM, check what the rice actually does to you. Because your blood sugar cannot read the marketing on the packet.

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