For years, every bottle sold in Ladakh had already spent weeks on the road — packed elsewhere, warmed by the sun, and carried across mountain passes before it reached home. In 2013, we set out to change that.
Before 2013, not a single drop of packaged drinking water was bottled in Ladakh. Every bottle on every shelf had travelled in from outside — packed weeks earlier, stored for months, and hauled across mountain passes under direct sun before it ever reached a Ladakhi home. By the time it arrived, it wasn't really fresh anymore. It was old water, just wearing new packaging.
Mohammed Anis saw the gap nobody else had bothered to close. In 2013, he founded Khayul to do the one thing no company had done before — bottle Ladakh's own glacier water, close to its source, before altitude, sunlight, and time could touch it. It became the region's first packaged drinking water company, built in Ladakh, for Ladakh.
Ladakh's first packaged drinking water company begins, bottled at the source instead of shipped in from outside.
Officially certified under India's food safety authority — formalising a standard we already held ourselves to.
Khayul meets the Bureau of Indian Standards' benchmark for packaged drinking water quality.
Khayul becomes a legally protected name — Ladakh's water, under a name Ladakh can finally call its own.
Mohammed Anis grew up in Leh at a time when good water was something you waited for — trucked in from outside, warmed by the sun on the way, and sold at a premium for the trouble. Rather than accept that as the norm, he set out to prove Ladakh could bottle its own water, on its own terms. That conviction became Khayul in 2013: a company built not around marketing water, but around respecting it — drawn fresh, sealed fast, and never made to travel further than it has to.
"We didn't set out to build a water brand. We set out to give Ladakh water it could finally call fresh."
