The Montreal couple who met in Tokyo and built a Sri Lankan pantry line around small-farm fair trade sourcing

A Tokyo dance floor, a Sri Lankan childhood, and a Montreal address

The story does not start in a co-packer. It starts on a dance floor in Tokyo in 2004, where Chanaka Kurera, who grew up in Sri Lanka, met Marise May, who grew up in Montreal. Two years later, back in Canada, the two of them founded Cha's Organics in Montreal. The legal entity is Sahana Ayurvedic Products, Inc., the consumer-facing brand is Cha's Organics, and the through-line of the whole company is Chanaka's home country.

The premise was specific. Sri Lanka grows some of the best coconuts, spices, and tea in the world, and a lot of that production sits on small and medium family-owned farms that do not have direct access to North American grocery. A Sri Lankan founder living in Canada was in an unusually good position to bridge that gap on terms that protected the farmers. The brand built its sourcing model around biodiverse, small-scale, organic agriculture in Sri Lanka, and then engineered the Canadian end of the supply chain to match: certified organic, fair trade where applicable, and certified by Ecocert Canada under the Sahana Ayurvedic Products entity.

What is actually in the lineup

The flagship: Premium Organic Coconut Milk, sold in 400 mL and 405 mL formats depending on the channel. The recipe is gum-free, which is unusual in the category, and the cans are lined with a polyester resin that Cha's states does not contain titanium, BPA, BADGE, BPF, or BPS. For shoppers who pay attention to can linings, that specification is the headline.

The pantry: coconut cream, light coconut milk, a range of curry pastes that lean Sri Lankan rather than Thai, finishing sauces, single-origin spices, dals, and dried beans. The lineup is broad enough to cook an entire Sri Lankan meal out of one cart, and narrow enough that every SKU shares the same sourcing logic and certification stack.

Where it is made and sourced: Sri Lanka for the agricultural inputs, with the Canadian company operating out of Montreal at 3700 St Patrick Suite 312 and a second address at 2505 Rue Cohen. The Canadian phone number begins with the 514 Montreal area code. The brand describes its sourcing partners as biodiverse small and medium-sized family-owned organic farms.

Why the can lining is part of the story

Canned coconut milk is one of the few pantry categories where the can itself is a meaningful part of the product. Most conventional can linings rely on epoxy resins that historically contained BPA and its replacement compounds, including BADGE, BPF, and BPS. Cha's Organics took an explicit position on this, switching to a polyester resin lining and publishing the specification openly on its product page and social channels. The brand has stated that its cans do not contain BPA, BADGE, BPF, or BPS, which is the kind of supply-chain decision that costs money up front and only pays back if the brand can keep telling shoppers why it matters.

Combined with a gum-free recipe, the can lining is a signal of how the company thinks about formulation. The default for the category is to use carrageenan or guar gum to keep the coconut cream and water emulsified on shelf. Cha's skips the gum, which means the can can separate on the shelf, which is exactly how a real coconut milk behaves. Pantry shoppers who have learned to give the can a shake before opening it tend to read that separation as a feature, not a defect.

The Honorary Consul angle

One of the more unusual data points on this brand is that Chanaka Kurera was appointed Honorary Consul of Sri Lanka for Montreal, Quebec, a role officially recognized by the Sri Lankan Ministry of Foreign Affairs and reported by the Daily FT, the Sri Lankan business paper. That is not a marketing title. It is a diplomatic appointment that sits alongside his role as Co-founder, President, and CEO of the company. For a sourcing story that depends on long-term relationships with Sri Lankan farming communities, having a founder who is also the official consular representative of that country in Montreal is a real structural advantage. It is the kind of credential most pantry brands cannot manufacture.

How it compares to other Canadian organic pantry brands

Cha's sits in an interesting position in the pantry aisle. On coconut milk it competes against Native Forest, the early US organic coconut milk brand, and against Thai Kitchen, the mainstream incumbent now owned by McCormick. Inside the broader Canadian organic-pantry lane, it shares shelf adjacency with independent Canadian brands like Three Farmers and MadeGood, both of which have built durable national footprints on a similar pattern of specific sourcing plus stacked third-party certifications.

Positioning reflects publicly listed information on each brand's site as of June 2026. Pricing intentionally omitted because it varies materially by retailer and pack size.

Why retailers keep adding Cha's to shelf

The clearest signal of how the brand has scaled inside Canada is that Costco Canada lists the Premium Organic Coconut Milk as a six-pack of 405 mL cans under a single Costco product code. Costco listings are not handed out generously. They reward brands that pull through, that ship clean on a pallet program, and that have a story a Costco shopper can read in five seconds: organic, fair trade, BPA-free, made for a real cuisine. Cha's checks all four boxes on a single can. Beyond Costco, the brand has stable national distribution through Amazon.ca and Well.ca, a strong Ontario natural-grocery footprint via Goodness Me!, and Quebec coverage through the distributor Satau.

That assortment is broad enough to make the brand reachable for most Canadian shoppers without being so dependent on any one channel that a delisting would damage the business. For an independent pantry brand without a private-equity backer, that distribution shape is the goal. It is also why a brand twenty years into its life can still be growing without compromising the sourcing model.

Where to actually buy it

Each link below goes to a live Cha's Organics listing or the brand's own product page, not just a homepage, so you can add the actual SKU to a cart without hunting:

For the full lineup, including curry pastes, sauces, spices, dals, and beans, browse chasorganics.com. Availability varies by retailer and region, so the brand site is the fastest way to check what is in stock today.

Bottom line

Cha's Organics is a study in what a patient, sourcing-first independent pantry brand looks like when it is built by founders who actually have both ends of the supply chain in their lives. A Sri Lankan childhood, a Montreal home, a Tokyo meeting, and twenty years of certified organic, fair trade, gum-free, BPA-free coconut milk and pantry SKUs sold through Costco Canada, Amazon.ca, Well.ca, Goodness Me!, Natura Market, and Satau. The Premium Organic Coconut Milk is the easiest doorway into the line, and once it is in the cupboard the curry pastes and spices follow on their own.