Collective Studios has partnered with True Story Films, founded by filmmaker Hansal Mehta and producer Sahil Sehgal, to announce Khana Dil Se – An AI Journey Through India’s Kitchen. The recently released teaser offers the first look at a unique episodic series exploring India’s culinary heritage through the lens of artificial intelligence.
Hansal Mehta has teamed up with Vijay Subramaniam for AI-led culinary series Khana Dil Se
For Mehta, the food marks a heartfelt return to the region where he first made his mark. In the early 1990s, he created food treasureThe pioneering cookery show that made chef Sanjeev Kapoor a household name and changed the way India thought about food on screen. Three decades later, Mehta returned to food, this time with AI as his ally.
Joining him in this new endeavor is Indian Master Chef Shamsher Ahmed, who has joined the board as a subject matter expert and culinary advisor. Ahmed’s decades-long experience in Indian regional cuisine will lend authenticity and rigor to the series as it navigates the country’s vast and diverse food traditions.
At its core, ‘Khana Dil Se’ is a cultural exploration of India through its kitchen, tracing stories of migration, memory and identity through recipes passed down through generations. What stands out in the series is the use of AI, not just as a visual and visualization tool, but as an ally in storytelling: helping to trace culinary lineages, highlight regional influences, and follow the journey of recipes as they have traveled and transformed across communities and centuries. Eating from the Heart reestablishes food as a living cultural heritage.
Speaking about the show, Hansal Mehta said, “Food is a memory. When you cook something from another culture, you’re not just following a recipe, you’re stepping into a part of someone else’s life. A recipe holds within itself an entire history: of land, of migration, of grandmothers’ hands. These are perhaps humanity’s most enduring cultural documents, passed down through generations, across borders, surviving when almost nothing else does That’s what makes food an honest way to see people and who they really are. With Khana Dil Se, we want to use every tool we have, including AI, to unearth those stories.”
Producer Sahil Sehgal, a hotel management alumnus of Les Roches, Switzerland and a restaurateur himself, said, “Khana Dil Se gave us an opportunity to ask what food television would look like if AI were part of the process – not replacing the human story, but helping us delve deeper into it. There are culinary traditions across India that have never been documented. This is our attempt to discover them.”
Vijay Subramaniam, Founder and Group CEO, Collective Artist Network, said, “At Collective, we have always believed that storytelling evolves with the tools we have. India’s culinary traditions are one of the richest cultural archives in the world, yet many of these stories remain undocumented. Food from the Heart brings together creators, filmmakers and technologists to bring those stories to light in a way that has not been attempted before.”
Produced by True Story Films in association with Collective Artists Network’s Collective Studios, Food from the heart – an AI journey through the kitchens of India It is the first series of its kind that brings together culinary heritage and artificial intelligence to tell the story of India through its food.
