Ketan Vakil: The Cook Who Took a Broth Label to Federal Court

Every serious recipe starts the same way: soften an onion, add garlic. For Ketan Vakil that first line was the problem. The stomach trouble began in his teens, and by his own count it took “a long stretch of doctor visits” before anyone could name a cause. When the answer finally came, it was a low-FODMAP diet, which meant giving up the two ingredients under half of everything he liked to cook. “For a cook,” he writes in his company’s founding story, “that was sad news to swallow.” What he did next is why he is in this section. He found a workaround at a farmers market, turned it into a small food company, and then, when a federal agency told him he could not print two words on a carton of beef broth, he took the question to court.

The answerA breath test he had to ask for

Vakil is careful about how he tells the medical part, and so are we. He had read that hydrogen breath tests were sometimes used to look at how people absorb certain sugars, and, as he told FODMAP Everyday, “I basically had to push to have this test, myself, from a well-known hospital in NYC.” He already knew lactose was a problem; “finding a large spike on the fructose graph was a game changer.” In the same breath he adds the caveat most founders would skip: those tests “have since been shown to be less than reliable” (the research agrees with him). What mattered was what happened when he changed how he ate, which, he says, “proved true almost immediately.”

A low-FODMAP diet is a real, studied thing and also a modest one. In the Monash University trial that put it on the map, 30 people with IBS scored their overall gut symptoms at about 23 on a 100-point scale during three weeks of low-FODMAP eating, against about 45 on a typical diet. The American College of Gastroenterology recommends “a limited trial” of it for IBS, and grades that recommendation as conditional, on very low quality evidence. It is meant to be temporary and done with a dietitian. It is also, as anyone who has tried it knows, hard on dinner.

The workaroundThe part of the garlic plant nobody was selling

Vakil grew up around food that did not hold back. “My father is from India, my grandmother is Polish and my mother is a great cook,” he told Monash’s FODMAP blog, “so I grew up eating dishes with lots of flavorful ingredients.” The fructans that cause trouble sit mostly in the bulbs of garlic and onion, and Monash’s own long-standing advice to people on the diet is to cook with the green parts of spring onions or chives. Vakil pushed that idea as far as it would go. “Then I found garlic scapes at a farmers market in New York,” he writes. “A scape tastes like garlic with the sharp edges sanded off, green and faintly sweet.” Garlic chives and scallion tops worked too. He froze bags of them so he could cook through the winter. “The allium family had been hiding a workaround the whole time.”

The companyA marketer, a freezer full of scapes, and a very small team

He is not a chef, a dietitian or a scientist, and says so: “I’m just a passionate foodie with firsthand FODMAP experience who also happens to be a marketer.” He holds an MBA from NYU’s Stern School of Business and spent most of his career in digital marketing. He began working on Gourmend in 2018 and launched its first products in 2020, a garlic scape powder and an organic chicken broth, after what he describes as two years of finding the right formulas, suppliers and manufacturers. “It’s been a labor of love since the beginning.” The range today is broths, seasoning powders and finishing salts made with scallion and leek greens, garlic scapes and garlic chives and none of the bulbs, sold on the company’s site, on Amazon and at grocers including Erewhon, MOM’s Organic Market, Lassens and Central Market.

The paperwork is unusually good for a company this size. Gourmend has been a Certified B Corp since November 2022, with a score of 114 against a median of about 51 for ordinary businesses, and in 2026 it became a public benefit corporation, writing commitments such as “labels you can take at face value” into its charter. Its products launched with Monash University’s low-FODMAP certification and are now certified by FODMAP Friendly, the other main testing program, which lab-tests each product at a stated serving. When the lawsuit below was filed in 2023, the complaint described Vakil as the company’s sole employee. By his own account on LinkedIn, Gourmend passed $1 million in sales in 2025, bootstrapped, on less than $90,000 of advertising.

The caseTwo words on a carton of beef broth

Here is the part that made the news. Most food labels in the United States are regulated by the FDA, and companies do not need permission before printing them. Gourmend’s chicken broth and seasonings fall on that side, and they say “low FODMAP” on the pack. Its beef bone broth falls under the USDA, whose Food Safety and Inspection Service has to approve a label before it can be used. In July 2022, according to the court record, the agency told Gourmend to “remove all references to digestible, gut loving, and fodmap” or the label would not be approved. The government’s reasoning is technical and not unreasonable on its face: “low FODMAP” is what regulators call a nutrient content claim, and the regulations define “low” for things like fat and sodium but not for FODMAPs. A company can petition to have a new claim defined.

Vakil’s view, as he put it to the trade publication Nosh, is that the rule ends up hiding true information from the people who most need it. “We want the FDA and USDA involved and we don’t want stuff to be false,” he said, “but this is a very factual claim that helps people and not knowing it hurts people.” In March 2023 he, his company and Michelle Przybocki, a Las Vegas speech therapist with IBS who shops by those labels, filed a First Amendment suit in federal court in Nevada. They are represented, free of charge, by the Institute for Justice, which describes itself as a nonprofit public-interest law firm and is widely described as libertarian. The district court dismissed the case in 2024, finding that none of the three had shown the kind of injury that lets a person sue.

On August 3, 2026, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals brought most of it back. In a published opinion, the court held that Przybocki can sue both agencies as a consumer with a right to receive the information, and that Vakil and Gourmend can sue the FDA, because the government “could not provide any assurance” that it would not act against the labels they already use. The win is partial, and it is worth being exact about that. In a separate, unpublished ruling the same day, the panel left Vakil and Gourmend’s own claims against the USDA dismissed, because they had not first used the agency’s internal appeals process. And no court has yet decided the real question, which is whether the labeling rules violate the First Amendment. The case now goes back to Nevada for that. “After three years, we finally get to make that case,” Vakil said in a statement after the ruling, “for us, and for everyone still guessing in the grocery aisle.”

Whatever the courts decide, the question he has forced is one this publication cares about: what a food label is allowed to tell you, and who decides. We spend a lot of our time reading labels closely, and it is not often that the person on the other side of the label is arguing to print more of the truth on it.

The disclosure mapWhere his interests sit

Vakil owns and runs the company whose products are described here, and he and the company are plaintiffs in the case, so a win would have direct commercial value to him. His sales figure is his own, unaudited. Gourmend pays for its third-party low-FODMAP certification, as every certified brand does, and the Institute for Justice is a donor-funded organization with a point of view about regulation, which is worth knowing when you read its press releases. He is a founder and a home cook, not a clinician, and his account of his own gut is his experience, not advice; a low-FODMAP diet is designed to be short and supervised, and no Gourmend product has been tested in a clinical trial or is claimed to treat anything. Gut Health Times has no commercial relationship with Gourmend and takes no affiliate commissions. This profile is educational, is not medical advice, and was prepared without input from the company.