Founder's note

Why I Am Building Miss Miel

By Dev Mehta, Founder, Miss Miel · Published 7 July 2026 · Last updated 7 July 2026

I work in manufacturing. I run production at a factory, and I am partway through an MBA. Factories teach you a specific habit: you stop seeing finished products and start seeing decisions. Every object on a table got there because someone chose it, or because nobody did.

That habit is why I could not stop looking at the sugar sachet.

The most ignored object on a good table

Watch tea service at a decent hotel. The cup is porcelain. The tray is polished. The napkin is folded. Next to all of it sits a paper sachet of refined sugar that costs a few paise and looks like it. The guest tears it, spills a little, needs a separate spoon to stir, and leaves a crumpled wrapper on the saucer.

Tea and coffee service is the most repeated moment a hotel has with its guests. It happens at breakfast, in the room, in the lobby, after dinner. And at the centre of that moment is the one object on the table that nobody chose with care.

Why honey

Honey already belongs at that moment. Plenty of guests would rather stir honey into their tea if it were offered properly. The honey was never the problem. The format was. A jar on a buffet turns sticky and unhygienic within an hour. A honey sachet is worse than a sugar sachet: honey is thick, so half of it stays inside the packet, and you still need a spoon.

So the question became: what is the right container for one serving of honey?

Two answers, not one

The first answer is the Honey Spoon. Make the spoon itself the serving: a sealed, single-serve spoon holding 8 grams of pure honey. Tear the seal, stir, done. One object instead of three. The full portion instead of half a squeezed packet. A clean saucer instead of a wrapper.

The second answer took me longer to see. A spoon is the right tool when honey goes into something you stir. But a lot of honey never goes near a cup. It gets drizzled: over pancakes and toast on a breakfast tray, over curd, into a cheese platter, onto porridge on a flight. Stirring is not the action there, pouring is. That is the Honey Pod: a 16 gram hexagonal cup with a peel-back lid. Open it and drizzle, no cutlery needed at all.

Spoon for what you stir, pod for what you pour. Between the two, single-serve honey covers the whole table: tea service, breakfast trays, room service, banquets, flights, office pantries, gift boxes.

When I looked for who was making these formats in India at any real scale, I found almost nobody. Sealed honey spoons and peel-back pods are common in parts of Europe and the US. In India, the country that drinks more tea than anywhere else, the shelf is basically empty. That gap is Miss Miel.

What Miss Miel is

Miss Miel makes premium single-serve honey in those two formats, built for hospitality, corporate gifting and retail. The brand is deliberately quiet: pure honey, a clear seal you can see through, packaging that carries a buyer's logo as comfortably as ours. No superfood language, no health claims. Honey does not need exaggeration. It needs a better serve.

Where we are

I am building Miss Miel from Bhavnagar, Gujarat, alongside my operations work and the MBA. We are in concept validation: talking with certified manufacturers, hotel and cafe buyers, gifting curators and distributors across India, and letting their answers shape the product before the first pilot run. It is slow, unglamorous work on purpose. In food, getting sourcing, safety and unit economics right before launch is the whole game.

If you run F&B or procurement, build gift catalogues, or distribute to HoReCa, I would genuinely like to hear how portion service works in your world. And if you want early samples when they are ready, join the First Taste list through the enquiry form on this site. The first pilots go to the people who helped shape the product.

Dev Mehta
Founder, Miss Miel