Dipan Dalal has spent twenty-five years in food ingredients and speciality chemicals distribution. Few careers in the sector cover as many different vantage points on the same business: he has worked as an entrepreneur, as a Business Director for Food and Nutrition, and as a Market Segment Director for the Asia-Pacific region.
Three roles, three different questions
Each of those positions asks something different of the person holding it. Running your own distribution business is a question of survival first: customers, cash and whether next quarter's orders will arrive. A business director role asks how a whole portfolio performs, where to invest and what to stop doing. A regional segment role asks how the same category behaves across many countries at once, each with its own pace of adoption.
Having answered all three sets of questions is useful in a specific way. It means knowing what a manufacturer needs from a distribution partner, what a regional organisation measures, and what a customer on the ground actually experiences, rather than seeing the chain from one position only.
Building across India and Asia-Pacific
Dipan played a key role in expanding business across India and the Asia-Pacific markets, and his work has consistently involved building partnerships with manufacturers across geographies. For Indian food companies, regional exposure of that kind matters because ingredient categories rarely develop at the same rate everywhere. What is established practice in one market can be only beginning in another.
From M K Ingredients to SpecSol
Dipan is one of the three founders who built M K Ingredients & Specialties from 2001, grew it over eighteen years and saw it acquired in 2019. The founders then spent more than six years inside a global multinational before coming together again to form SpecSol in 2026.
That sequence, from building a business, to operating inside a large organisation, to building again, is the thinking behind how SpecSol is set up: the processes and discipline of a large organisation, run with the speed and personal commitment of a founder-led one.
What to talk to Dipan about
- Partnerships and how a distribution relationship should be structured
- Entering or expanding in the Indian market as an ingredient manufacturer
- How a speciality ingredients business scales without losing its technical depth