MDH Owner Mahashay’ Dharampal Gulati Passes away at 98

The ‘Spice King’ of India, MDH Owner Mahashay’ Dharampal Gulati Passes away at 98.

‘Mahashay’ Dharampal Gulati, the owner and face of masala brand MDH Spices passed away on December 3. He was 98 years old.

According to reports, Gulati was undergoing treatment at a hospital in New Delhi where he suffered a cardiac arrest on December 3 morning.

Gulati was born in Sialkot (now in Pakistan) on March 27, 1923 and later migrated to India after the partition. He dropped out of school and set up a small business in 1937 with the help of his father Mahashay Chunni Lal Gulati, before joining the family business of spices.

Dharampal came to India after partition with just Rs 1,500 in his hand. Out of Rs 1,500 he purchased a Tonga for Rs 650 and would drove it from New Delhi Railway Station to Qutab Road and Karol Bagh to Bara Hindu Rao at two Annas sawari for a few days. Afterwards, he bought a small wooden shop (also known as khokha/Hatti) at Ajmal Khan Road in Delhi’s Karol Bagh. He started his family business of ground spices and again raised the banner of Mahashian Di Hatti of Sialkot “DEGGI MIRCH WALE“.

From the small hatti that Gulati opened, he slowly and steadily turned it into an Rs 1,000 crore empire, today globally known as MDH Masala.

MDH is now a big brand and it exports spices to countries across the world such as Switzerland, Japan, the US, and Canada. MDH spices are sold throughout India and abroad through a network of over 1000 Stockists and over 4 lakh retail dealers. MDH sells products across various range from ground spices to blended spices and even exotic spices like saffron.

Gulati, affectionately called ‘Dadaji’ by some, was reportedly India’s highest-paid consumer products CEO in 2017 when he took home more than Rs 21 crore as salary.

In 2017, Gulati was India’s highest-paid FMCG CEO, getting salary of over 21 crore, which was higher than Adi Godrej and Vivek Gambhir of Godrej Consumer, Sanjiv Mehta of Hindustan Unilever and YC Deveshwar of ITC. MDH had posted a net profit of Rs 213 crore while its total revenues were Rs 924 crore in 2017 fiscal.