Ritu’s route to inventing a probiotic was not a straight line — and that is rather the point. For most of her career, she worked on a single question from different distances: how do people actually heal?

She began at the scale of populations. As a development consultant with the Canadian International Development Agency, and then as a programme advisor with the United Nations Population Fund, she spent the better part of a decade on reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, and women’s welfare — first analysing health programmes across Asia, then advising twenty-one countries across the Caribbean. It was public health at its widest aperture: policy, funding, the machinery that decides whether millions of people ever receive care.

Then she moved to the opposite scale — one person at a time. Grounded in East-West psychology and counselling, she built a clinical practice in therapeutic recovery, working with people through depression, phobias, chronic pain, and the burdens the body quietly carries. The population years had shown her the systems; clinical practice showed her the individual — and how often a person’s troubles begin somewhere medicine doesn’t quite think to look.

Food was a throughline she hadn’t yet named. She found it building Beyond Passé, where she created India’s vegan cheese category from nothing — proof that a whole population’s relationship to food can be remade, not just one plate at a time. By then, the question had sharpened to its final form: if food can be rebuilt, what is the most important thing we could rebuild it to do?

The answer, when it came, arrived the hardest way — through the person closest to her.