When a new mother delivered in Mithila, she didn’t go straight back to her kitchen. She rested. She was fed. And among the foods her family kept within reach during those weeks was thekua, made from whole wheat, jaggery, and ghee. Not because someone prescribed it. Because it was the food that gave warmth, that lasted, that didn’t need refrigeration, that the whole family could eat from the same dabba.
Nobody called it a superfood. Nobody called it postpartum nutrition. It was just what was made. What was there. What worked.
That food is now harder to find than it should be. At The Thekua Company, we’re fixing that. But before we talk about the company, you should know who actually makes it.
Neetu Yadav — The One Who Built the Market
Neetu grew up in North Mithila, near Purnea. In her house, the steel dabba was never empty. Thekua wasn’t served at festivals or on occasions. It was Tuesday afternoon. It was the thing you reached for between meals, the thing put in front of guests without fuss, the thing that sat on the kitchen shelf the way biscuits sit in most Indian homes today.
She didn’t think of this as tradition. It was just food.
Then she left Mithila. And slowly, without any single announcement, the dabba stopped being refilled. Not because anyone had decided thekua was no longer relevant, but because where she was, there was nowhere to buy it. And the biscuits were everywhere.
“All these biscuits had taken the place of thekua,” she says. “Earlier, thekua was something served with tea, as an evening snack, as recovery food for new mothers. All of that was now biscuits. I didn’t think it needed to be this way.”
She sat with this for a while. Then she and Geeta tried the thekua being sold by other brands online. That’s when frustration turned into a decision.
“It didn’t taste like authentic thekua. And when we checked, it was fried in refined oil. Thekua is not fried in refined oil. That’s not what it is. We decided to bring the authentic recipe to people who deserved to eat the real thing.”
This is the founding story of The Thekua Company. Not nostalgia. Not a heritage project. A specific, practical decision: the market had the wrong product, and the right product needed a market.
What Neetu built is the half of the business that most people never see, the supply chain, the packaging, the digital infrastructure, the decisions about which orders to take and which to turn down, the judgment calls that happen between a homemaker’s kitchen and a customer’s doorstep.
On an average day, she’s making thekua, in the jaggery version, the sugar version, and the dry fruits variant that’s been in development, and spending time with her family. The two things aren’t separate. The family is the test audience. The standard is the smile after the first bite. If the batch doesn’t produce it, the batch doesn’t ship.
That smile is the only metric she’s never stopped measuring against.
Geeta Singh — The One Who Holds the Recipe
Geeta didn’t learn thekua from a written recipe. There isn’t one. She learned from her grandmother, who learned from her grandmother. Four generations of direct transmission, hands teaching hands, kitchen to kitchen, without a single measurement being written down.
The recipe travelled that way because it didn’t need paper. The knowledge lived in how the dough felt when it was ready. In what the ghee smelled like at the right temperature. In the colour, the thekua turned when it was done. You either learned those things or you didn’t. Geeta learned them.
It didn’t happen immediately. “Grandmother was guiding,” she says, “but in the beginning, the texture and the sweetness, getting both right at the same time, that was the hard part.”
Not one or the other. Both together. A thekua that has the right crunch but sweetness that’s too sharp isn’t right. One with beautiful jaggery flavour but a texture that’s too dense isn’t right either. The balance between them is where the recipe lives, and finding it took time and repetition that no written guide could have accelerated.
Today, Geeta doesn’t need the guide. She checks a batch the way someone who has made something a thousand times checks it, not with a checklist, but with senses that have been calibrated over years.
She smells it first. Before she tastes it, before she assesses the crunch, before she looks at the colour, she smells it. The aroma of properly made thekua, fried in desi ghee with jaggery at the right ratio, is specific and unmistakable. If the aroma is right, she knows she’s close. Then the crunch, it should break cleanly without being hard. Then how easy it is to bite. Then the taste.
In that order. Every time.
“If the quality is not up to the mark, from taste, colour, or crunch, it doesn’t go out,” she says. There’s no negotiation on this. A batch that passes Geeta’s check goes to the customer. A batch that doesn’t get remade.
This is not a quality control policy. It’s not written anywhere in a manual. It’s the standard her grandmother held, that her grandmother’s grandmother held before that, now applied to every order that leaves the kitchen.
For Neetu, it was loss and restoration, watching a food disappear from everyday life and deciding that wasn’t acceptable. Her relationship to thekua is through the market it should have had. She thinks about who should be eating this and isn’t. She thinks about what it means for a food to be available only once a year when it was always meant to be eaten every week.
For Geeta, it’s craft. She’s not primarily thinking about the market. She’s thinking about whether the batch is right. Whether the dough felt the way it should. Whether the aroma when it came out of the ghee matched the one her grandmother’s kitchen produced. Her relationship to thekua is entirely through the making of it.
The company needs both. A product that’s perfectly made but nobody can find helps nobody. A product that’s perfectly marketed but made wrong lets everyone down. The Thekua Company works because neither half can function without the other.
“When I see that smile after someone takes the first bite, a customer who hasn’t tasted real thekua in years, or someone who’s trying it for the first time — that’s why we built this. Not for reviews. Not for revenue. For that specific moment.”
— Neetu Yadav, Co-Founder, The Thekua Company
What They’re Building Next
The Thekua Company is Brand 01 under The Mithila House, a platform being built to give every forgotten recipe from Mithila its own brand, its own market, and its own homemaker.
Thekua came first because it was the food both of them grew up with. Gujiya is next, a recipe that was never written down, that lived in kitchens through the ratio of khoya to the seal at the edge. Anarsa, after that, a three-day process that cannot be rushed, made from rice that soaks on its own terms and fries only when it’s ready.
Every brand under The Mithila House will be built the same way The Thekua Company was, around the homemaker who makes it, not around the occasion it’s associated with. These foods were always everyday foods. The platform is how they become that again.
If You Haven’t Tried It Yet
Every batch at The Thekua Company is made by Neetu and Geeta, the same recipe, the same method, the same aroma check before anything ships. Made fresh after your order. No pre-made stock. No factory production. The thekua that arrives at your door was made within the last 48 hours.
Made in Mithila. By homemakers who never stopped making it.
About the author
Neetu Yadav
Co-Founder, The Thekua Company & Mithila House
Neetu grew up in Mithila, where thekua was never a festival food; it was just food. The snack in the steel dabba is made every week, without a recipe card. She co-founded The Thekua Company to give that everyday food the everyday market it always deserved. Every batch that leaves the kitchen meets the standard she grew up with.
