Made In Rural India: A Brand and a Marketplace for Farmers

Indians consume roughly 40 times more pesticides through their food than the average American or European, and most food brands had no real relationship with the farmers actually growing what they sold. Mindtree.org's I Got Crops initiative worked directly with farmers to build transparent, direct supply chains instead, and MIRI, Made In Rural India, was the farmer-owned brand built to bring that model to customers.

This case study covers two connected pieces of work: building MIRI's brand identity from nothing, and then designing the Android app that let customers order direct from farm to a branded pickup location.

The identity was built around a cotton plant mark and an earthy, modern palette, farmer-centric without leaning on the tired "rustic" visual cliché that most agricultural branding falls back on. That system carried across packaging, from kraft-paper pouches to honey jars finished with a simple cloth tie, and into a physical MIRI presence where customers could see and collect what they'd ordered.

The app extended that same brand into an actual transaction: customers ordered groceries sourced directly from local farmers and collected them at a MIRI pickup location. The goal was to design an online farmer's market while building real consumer awareness of what a direct farm-to-table model actually meant. The harder problem was competing with mainstream grocery apps without losing the thing that made MIRI different: the app's narrative had to stay with the farmer and his story, not just the transaction.

A lot of MIRI's target customers weren't regular online shoppers, so the account flow had to ask for almost nothing before letting someone in: a name, a mobile number, and an OTP. Every extra field was a reason to give up before ever seeing a farmer's story.

The transactional screens got the same care as everything else. An empty cart nudged someone back toward shopping instead of just sitting blank, and a confirmed order closed with a little warmth instead of a bare receipt, small moments of delight that kept MIRI feeling like a brand and not a checkout form.

Interviews on an early working prototype were positive: people found the app simple to use, navigation was easy, and the farmer-contribution messaging resonated. But one insight stood out. Some users didn't recognize product names, because the same produce is known by different names colloquially across India. A clean information architecture doesn't help if the words on it don't match how someone actually talks.

That fed directly into the next round: product imagery got more visual weight, interesting facts were added to each product, and a content roadmap was built so the app could keep closing that gap over time. The high-fidelity build added custom, hand-drawn iconography and animation to keep the brand's warmth intact as the product matured.

Every order showed customers exactly how much of what they paid went back to rural farms, right in the cart. The checkout screen stated it plainly, this order's contribution to rural farms is however many rupees, next to the total.

But the real mechanic lived one tap deeper, in a screen that introduced customers to an actual farmer by name. Parvathi, one of the farmers MIRI worked with, had her own profile: what she'd earned through MIRI next to what she would have earned selling through the usual chain of middlemen, and a breakdown of exactly where each rupee in that difference went. That contribution was then translated into something tangible:

• —A month of good schooling
• —A year of health insurance for the family
• —Equipment to grow her own business
• —Livestock, seed, or fertilizer for the next season

It wasn't a loyalty gimmick. It was the clearest possible answer to a question every customer was implicitly asking: does my purchase actually matter to someone.

That last note was fair, and it shaped what came next: more engaging content to support healthy living, goal-based product lists for things like weight loss or low cholesterol, and the ability to favourite and reorder past purchases so returning customers didn't have to rebuild an order from scratch every time.