You Don't Need 20 Supplements, You Just Need the Right One - Akshita Singla, Aakya Wellness

Supplements are one of those categories where people spend a lot, hope a lot, and stay confused. The labels look smart. The branding looks premium. The claims sound scientific. But the average Indian consumer still has no real idea what their body actually needs. Doctors say one thing. Dietitians say another. Instagram says something else entirely. And in between all of that noise, you have shelves stacked with bottles that all promise the same thing.

Today's guest grew up watching this industry from the inside. Akshita Singla comes from a pharmaceutical family. She spent her childhood around the conversation of medicines, manufacturing, and formulation. After studying abroad and working in Luxembourg, she came back to India, looked at her own mother's supplement shelf, and decided the entire category needed someone to be honest about it.

Aakya Wellness is the brand she built. Clean label, sitting at the intersection of Ayurveda and modern bioactives, formulated and manufactured in-house. Aakya didn't start because Akshita wanted to be in nutraceuticals. It started because she couldn't find a single multivitamin she actually trusted. So she built one. Then another. Then a herbal tea. Then a collagen that took 70 to 80 iterations to nail the taste alone.

This conversation is about what's actually inside the bottle, why a 500 rupee collagen and a 5,000 rupee collagen can be ten times apart in real quality, why brands use stevia instead of monk fruit, and what it takes to build a supplement brand in India where honesty is the moat, not the marketing.

Key Takeaways: How to Decode the Indian Supplement Aisle

The Industry Is Confusing By Design:

• "No sugar" on a pack does not mean no sweetener. Sugar-free can still contain sucralose. "No artificial sweetener" can still contain sugar. Both are legal claims that mislead the consumer
• A 500 rupee collagen and a 5,000 rupee collagen can have a real ten-times quality gap. Sourcing the right ingredient costs more, and good brands cannot retail at the price of cheap ones
• Stevia is cheaper than monk fruit, which is why most brands use it. The choice of sweetener is a quiet signal of how clean a brand actually is

The Aakya Bet:

• Build at the intersection of Ayurveda and modern bioactives. PCOS, sleep, stress, immunity. Use whatever evidence-backed ingredient delivers the cleanest result, not what fits one ideology
• Manufacture in-house, which gives the brand room to run 70 to 80 flavor iterations on a single collagen instead of accepting the first vendor sample
• Build an AM and PM philosophy into the multivitamin and herbal tea range. Ashwagandha, green tea and tulsi in the morning. L-theanine, chamomile and lavender at night. Match the body's actual rhythm

The Honest Consumer Toolkit:

• Listen to your body first. Brain fog, fatigue, hair fall, broken sleep are all signals before they're deficiencies
• A nutritious diet, hydration, sleep and movement come before any supplement. Most people skip the basics and reach for the bottle
• Stick to recommended dosage. Ashwagandha is not a problem ingredient. Overdosing it is

Q: You come from a pharmaceutical family but you didn't see yourself in this space. How did Aakya actually start?

Akshita: I never really envisioned myself being in a nutraceutical space. The industry chose me first and I chose it second. I come from a pharmaceutical family. I've always grown up around the conversation of medicines.

I personally experienced supplements first hand when I was living abroad. I was working in Luxembourg, and the winters there are really harsh. There's almost no sun for four to five months. I was already warned to start taking vitamin D and magnesium. I never took it seriously until I started getting bad brain fog and fatigue at work after three or four pm. I started taking vitamin D and magnesium and I genuinely saw the difference.

Then I came back to India, my mom was sick, and she was taking a lot of supplements from a premium brand. The brand was priced at a premium scale but the product did not stand the quality they claimed. I asked her to stop, looked for alternatives, and saw how few clean, transparent brands actually existed in India. That's where Aakya started.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: Most founders pretend they always saw the gap. Akshita is honest. The gap chose her. The clearest market insights tend to come from a personal supplement shelf, not a deck. The day a founder stops their own mother from taking a product is usually the day a brand gets born.

Q: Aakya sits at the intersection of Ayurveda and bioactives. Why both?

Akshita: Our first ideology was that we wanted to build products at the intersection of Ayurveda, herbal, and modern bioactive ingredients. The idea was, why not create a product with the best efficacy possible, no matter if the answer is bioactive, herbal, or a combination of both.

For sleep, you can use L-theanine or melatonin and add turmeric and chamomile on top. For PCOS, the clinically validated solution is myo-inositol and d-chiro-inositol, so we don't add more for the sake of it. The point is to give the cleanest, most effective answer to a single problem statement. Not stick to one ideology just because the brand sounds purer.

If a single bioactive solves it, that's the solution. If a herbal blend solves it better, that's the solution. We try not to be religious about either side.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: Most Indian wellness brands lean hard either Ayurveda-only or science-only because the marketing is easier. Aakya picks a third path. Solve the problem, then label the brand. The category will eventually move here. Consumers don't care whether it's bioactive or herbal. They care whether they slept.

Q: What's the difference between a bioactive and a herbal ingredient?

Akshita: Bioactives are usually grown in a lab. Niacinamide and retinol in skincare are bioactives. Herbal or Ayurvedic ingredients come from roots, plants, or traditional preparations our grandmothers told us about. Haldi is Ayurvedic. Ashwagandha is herbal. Both can work, both have evidence, and the right product often combines them.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: The bioactive vs herbal debate is a marketing war, not a product war. Consumers think they have to pick a side. The best formulators don't.

Q: You said the bigger problem in this category isn't the product, it's honesty. What does honesty actually look like on a supplement label?

Akshita: Honesty is easy to say. Selling honesty is difficult. Clean has different definitions. A brand can say no sugar, but no sugar does not mean no sweetener. They could be using sucralose. A brand can say no artificial sweetener and still have sugar on the label. Those are word games.

You as a brand have to figure out how to make the consumer actually understand how clean you are. We started product first because if the product is right, you have something to be honest about. If the product is wrong, no amount of clean copy fixes it. Honesty in this industry is technical work, not marketing.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: Every wellness brand says they're clean. The honest ones can show you why on the back of the pack. Reading "no sugar" and feeling safe is exactly the trick the industry counts on. Aakya's first job is to retrain the consumer to flip the bottle.

Q: There's a real gap between a 500 rupee collagen and a 5,000 rupee collagen. Can the quality really be ten times apart?

Akshita: Yes. Honestly yes. Sourcing matters. Organic sugar costs around 300 rupees a kilo while regular sugar is 30. Same with collagen. The collagen we're sourcing is super expensive. I don't know how to retail it cheaper. There needs to be margin for me too.

It's the same with sweeteners. Brands use stevia instead of monk fruit because stevia is cheaper. If everyone used monk fruit, their cost of producing the product goes up, and they have to retail it higher. So they default to stevia, even though monk fruit is cleaner and tastes better.

There are also brands marking up a 100 rupee product to a premium price. You as a consumer have to be smarter and check the quality you're paying for.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: Price is a signal in supplements, not just a number. If a product looks impossibly cheap for what it claims, the maths usually didn't work for a clean ingredient. The next decade of D2C wellness will be won by brands that can actually justify a higher price line by line on the back of the pack.

Q: What signs should the body actually give before you reach for a supplement?

Akshita: Our body is fabulous. It tells us. The signs are individual. Are you feeling more tired than before? Are you not able to concentrate at work? Hair fall? Bad sleep? Those are signals.

But before you reach for a supplement, ask why. If you're not sleeping, it could be stress. For stress, you don't need a supplement first. Move more. Try meditation. Have a chamomile or peppermint tea at night. If those don't fix it, then check magnesium. The basics like food, hydration, sleep, movement come before any bottle.

There's no one-size-fits-all in nutrition. Two 25 year olds, one male and one female, will need different protein and different micronutrients. Listen to your body, then if the signal stays, get bloodwork done. Don't supplement first.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: The wellness industry's biggest enemy is good sleep, regular meals, and a walk. Consumers default to a 1,500 rupee bottle because it feels like progress. The honest first prescription is usually free. Aakya is one of the few brands that will say it out loud.

Q: Aakya's multivitamin is built around an AM and PM philosophy. Why split it?

Akshita: Our body needs different things in the morning than in the evening. We didn't want to launch a multivitamin at all, but we couldn't find a holistic formula on the market, so we built one.

The AM has Ashwagandha and Tulsi for energy and stress balance. We tested green tea extract in one formulation. The PM has L-theanine and chamomile so the body can wind down. The herbal tea range follows the same idea. AM is green tea, lemongrass and peppermint. PM is chamomile, lavender and peppermint for stress relief.

The body has its own clock. If you give it the same blend morning and night, you're fighting the rhythm. If you match it, the formula does more with less.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: Most multivitamins in India are a single capsule that pretends every micronutrient peaks at the same time. The body doesn't work that way. Splitting AM and PM is not a marketing gimmick. It's just respecting circadian biology, which most brands skip because it doubles their SKU count.

Q: There's a lot of noise around ashwagandha right now. Is it safe?

Akshita: Ashwagandha is not a bad ingredient. The quality of the root matters. One brand might be selling it at 100 rupees per 100 grams, another at 1,000 rupees per 100 grams. That's the difference. The other piece is dosage. If you're told ashwagandha is good and you start taking more than the recommended quantity, it will fire back at you.

Anything in excess is bad. There's a reason every brand puts a recommended dosage on the label. Stick to it. Ashwagandha is fine. Misuse is the problem.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: Sourcing and dosage are doing 90% of the work in any herbal supplement. The ingredient on the label is the smallest part of the story. The next FSSAI scare won't be about a herb. It will be about the supply chain behind it.

Q: You manufacture in-house. What does that actually buy you?

Akshita: A lot. When you're doing it in-house, you can control the quality and you can do a lot more iteration. For our collagen, we did at least 70 to 80 iterations just on the taste. We tried at least 10 different flavor vendors. We tested monk fruit at 50 mg, 500 mg, 1 gram to see how the taste changed.

That's only possible because the structure is in place. If you're outsourcing, you can still build a brand, but it becomes rigid. There's less room to play. With our setup, the experts in the facility can guide us, give input, and partners are easier to find. Outsourcing brands have to do all of that themselves.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: 80 iterations on a flavor is not a vanity number. It's the difference between a collagen consumers actually finish and a collagen that sits in the back of the pantry. Owning manufacturing isn't just margin. It's permission to fail in private until the product is right.

Q: Where are you actually using AI inside Aakya?

Akshita: We use AI when we're doing formulations. We give it our problem statement, the existing products in India and the West, what's working and what's not. Then I ask Claude or ChatGPT for inputs on what could work better in the Indian market. Genetics, surroundings, food are all different here. Just because something works in another market does not mean it's right for us.

It saves months of mapping. We still verify everything with our experts before any formulation goes to a trial batch. AI is also great for searching and scanning hundreds of clinical documents. But the output has to be cross-checked. ChatGPT specifically tends to agree with you. If you ask "is chamomile right at night," it says yes. Then you ask "or should I have peppermint," and it goes diplomatic. You have to act as the human and make the call.

We've also tried using AI to find suppliers. The output has been wrong more often than right. So AI is a great tool. It just needs evaluation.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: AI doesn't formulate supplements. It compresses the literature search by months. The biggest mistake new wellness founders make is letting an LLM design the product instead of helping them read the research. Use it as a research analyst, not a formulator.

Q: What's the AI use case in wellness you actually want to see?

Akshita: I'm not sure if it's already here, but I'd love to see the rings and watches that track your sleep and heart rate get clubbed with AI to give real recommendations. A personal nutritionist on the go, telling you to add more movement, hydrate more, or get more protein based on your actual day. That would be cool.

I already use AI for food. I click a picture of what I'm eating and ask Gemini for the protein estimate. I ask for recipes based on what I have on hand. Those are small wins. The bigger wellness use case is still missing.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: The wellness AI killer app isn't a chatbot. It's a quiet feedback loop sitting on your wrist. Until the data, the model and the recommendation collapse into one experience the user actually trusts, AI in wellness will keep being a search box. The first brand to stitch that loop wins everything.

Q: What's the one habit a consumer can build to find the right supplement instead of more supplements?

Akshita: First, try to complete your nutrition with food. Stay hydrated. Add movement. These are the basics, and most people skip them. Then comes supplementation. If you want protein, calculate roughly what your body needs. For a 60 kilo female, that's about 60 multiplied by 0.8, so 48 to 50 grams a day. You're not going to hit that on two scoops of protein powder. Divide it. Add natural sources first. Use protein powder only where the natural form falls short.

When you do pick a supplement, check the source. If the brand is not disclosing where the protein is sourced from, that's a red flag. Look at the amino acid profile. Avoid bulking agents and cheap emulsifiers. Sugar isn't the enemy. Synthetic sugar is. Monk fruit over stevia. No artificial colors. If you can check those things, you'll find the right supplement, not just more.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: The supplement aisle works on volume because consumers don't have a checklist. The single most useful thing a wellness brand can give a customer is the ability to read every other brand's label too. The honest founders are arming the customer, even if it costs them a sale today.

Final Thoughts: The Right Supplement Is a Smaller Stack

Akshita's reframe: "Listen to your body. Find the cause. If you can fix it with food, hydration or movement, do that. If you can't, then look for the right supplement, not more supplements."

The bottom line: India's supplement industry is going through the same growing pains every consumer category goes through when it scales fast. Lots of brands. Loud claims. Confusing labels. The winners over the next five years are going to be the brands that flip the script. Less marketing. More transparency. The kind of founder who'll tell you not to buy their product if your real problem is sleep.

Aakya is in that camp. Three years in, manufacturing in-house, formulating at the intersection of Ayurveda and bioactives, and treating the consumer like an adult who can handle the truth about stevia versus monk fruit. The category is going to get more crowded before it gets cleaner. The brands that will still be standing are the ones that didn't take shortcuts on sourcing, dosage or honesty.

For consumers, the takeaway is even simpler. You don't need 20 supplements. You need the basics, then the right one. For founders, the lesson is the same as in every D2C category. Product first, communication second, marketing third. Reverse the order and the brand collapses the moment a consumer flips the pack.

Q: How can people connect with you and learn more about Aakya Wellness?

Akshita: Please visit our website at aakyawellness.com. You'll find every product with full ingredient transparency, dosage, and the reasoning behind the formulation. We also share content on our social channels around how to read a supplement label, what to actually look for, and how to listen to your body before reaching for a bottle. If you've tried our products, please share feedback. We use it directly in our next iteration.

Final words: The Indian supplement aisle isn't broken because the products are bad. It's broken because the labels are smart. Akshita's bet is that a generation of Indian consumers is finally ready to flip the bottle, ask the right questions, and pay a little more for an answer they can trust. Aakya is small, it's bootstrapped in spirit, and it's playing a slow game. The fast brands win the quarter. The honest brands win the decade.

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