What the monsoon does to your lettuce
Four months a year, growing crisp greens in South Gujarat becomes genuinely difficult. Here is how we keep quality steady when the rain arrives.
Leela Fernandes
Head of Sourcing
7 min read
Every June, I have the same conversation with four different farmers. The rain is coming, the fields will flood, and the lettuce we have spent three months getting right will turn bitter and bolt within a fortnight.
Why rain ruins a leaf
Lettuce is roughly 95% water. When soil moisture spikes, the plant takes up water faster than it can build structure, and cell walls stretch thin. The result is a leaf that looks fine and collapses the moment it meets dressing.
Worse, heat stress during monsoon triggers bolting — the plant rushes to seed and floods its leaves with latex compounds. That is the bitterness you taste in a bad July salad.
- We shift 60% of leaf sourcing to polyhouse growers in Pune from June to September
- Hydroponic partners in Nashik cover the crisp varieties that suffer most
- Field-grown crops move to hardier leaves: kale, rocket, mustard greens
- We re-cut every menu in the last week of May to match what will actually be good
“The honest answer is that some salads should not exist in July. So we take them off the menu instead of serving you a worse version.”
The cost we absorb
Polyhouse greens cost us about 40% more than field-grown. We do not pass that on during monsoon, because a business that raises prices when quality gets harder to maintain is telling you something unflattering about itself.
