Two years of R&D
before we sold anything.
3basics is the consumer brand of Helios Biocred Private Limited. We grow, extract, test and manufacture at our own facility in Ghamroj, Gurugram — which is unusual in this industry, and it is the whole reason the company exists.
It started with a question that turned out to be harder than it looked.
Can you grow cordyceps properly in India?
Cordyceps is one of the most researched ingredients in the supplement world and one of the hardest to cultivate. It needs a controlled environment held steady over a long cycle. And by the time an extract has changed hands three or four times, testing what arrives tells you about the sample rather than the batch.
We spent two years on R&D at the Regional Centre for Biotechnology in Faridabad before we built anything at all. Then we built a facility at Ghamroj where we could do the whole thing ourselves — grow it, extract it, test it, and make the finished product under one roof.
We are a small company. We currently make two products. We would rather make two we can defend than twenty we cannot.
— Anshuman Kalra and Sabhya Saachi Sharma, directors
Five things we decided early, and have not moved on
Answer for the batch, not the sample
Anyone can test an incoming drum. We wanted to be able to tell you what is in the bottle you personally bought, which is why we grow and extract ourselves and publish a report per batch.
Say what the evidence actually shows
Where research is laboratory and animal work rather than human trials, we say so — on the product page, next to the claim. It costs us some conversions. It is worth more than it costs.
Never sell against fear
No symptom checklists, no lists of what goes wrong if you do not buy, no dramatising a problem to sell a solution. If you need a doctor rather than a supplement, we will say that instead.
Formulate, do not just fill
Regulation caps how much of a botanical a supplement may carry, so the answer is never simply "more". The work is in what sits alongside it, at what ratio, and how it is delivered.
Sell courses, not bottles
These are slow formulations. Pretending otherwise sells one bottle and loses a customer. We publish honest timelines and price the course so finishing it costs less than starting twice.
Two products we can defend
Adding SKUs is easy and standing behind them is not. The range grows when something earns its place, not when the shelf looks thin.
The unglamorous version.
Most of this period involved no product and no revenue. That is what building the capability actually looks like.
The question
Two directors, one problem: nobody in India could tell us reliably what was in a cordyceps extract.
Two years of R&D at RCB Faridabad
Strain, substrate, cycle, extraction. No product, no sales, no website.
The facility at Ghamroj
Growth chambers, extraction line, QC laboratory and manufacturing, in one building in HSIIDC Udyog Kunj.
FSSAI application filed
Statement of ingredients, technical personnel, facility documentation. Then four rounds of queries.
Licence granted
Five months and four query rounds after filing.
Two products, and a third in development
BASE on the Energy shelf, Vitamin D3 + K2 on Balance. Defence when it earns its place.
Grown. Extracted. Tested. Made.
Four stages, one roof, at HSIIDC Udyog Kunj in Ghamroj. Very few supplement brands in India manufacture their own products, and fewer still grow their own ingredients.
Inside the facility →Want to talk to us properly?
Distributors, clinics, practitioners and anyone with a technical question — we would rather have the conversation than send a brochure.