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EIGHTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD Jaanki Paati remembers her first cooking experience, when she was just 10. Her mother decided it was time Jaanki started learning the life skill. “The first thing she taught me was a simple meal of rice, sambhar and a vegetable. I still remember I’d made a tomato sambhar and potato fry,” she recalls. She soon started enjoying the cooking process. After she was married, she ensured that anyone who came into their home was heartily fed the food she made. “Hospitality is our culture. We should never abandon it,” she says. This love for serving and connecting with others through her food kept growing and in 2015, it translated into the south Indian snack brand Sweet Karam Coffee.
“I remember all of us cousins sitting around our grandmother. She would make balls of food and place them in our hands,” says Anand Bharadwaj, cofounder of Sweet Karam Coffee. This memory inspired the founders, who also include Nalini Parthiban, Srivatsan Sundararaman and Veera Raghavan, to launch the brand inspired by Jaanki Paati (Tamil for grandmother) — its energetic and kind face.
Although they had humble beginnings, Sweet Karam Coffee now offers various south Indian snacks including items like murukkus and chips, filter coffee powder and other milk mixes, sweets like Mysore pak and chikkis, pickles including lemon and raw mango, and more.
Their USP lies in the freshness and cleanness of their products, because Jaanki Paati isn’t just the face of the brand: She is its north star, its moral compass. “Food is the most commercially abused and exploited category, with insane adulterations,” says Bharadwaj. For this reason, Sweet Karam Coffee ensures that their food is made without any palm oil or preservatives, and with simple ingredients you can find in any home — just like your grandmother would prepare it.
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While food has been a way for Jaanki Paati to share her love with family, it has been a source of positivity for Urmila Asher, founder of another grandmother-led brand, Gujju Ben Na Nasta. Her story is a lesson in resilience and staying hopeful in the face of adversity. For the 80-year-old, life has been a series of tragedies, having lost all three children and seeing her only grandson get into an accident and lose his business. But nothing has broken her spirit. Circa 2019, during lockdown, in search of a new source of income, she started making pickles that sold spectacularly. In less than a month, they grandmother-grandson duo had sold over 450 kgs of pickle.
There was no looking back for the “Gujju ben”, who now has a successful business and a popular YouTube channel. She has also been a Masterchef contestant — leaving once there was non vegetarian food on the show — and a TEDx speaker. The business retails items like chaats, khakras, cookies and chips. On her YouTube page, one will find recipes for everything from Gujarati classics like thepla and dhokla to modern favourites like pasta and chocolate brownies. Simply put, food is her passion. “I love cooking food, eating food and feeding people my food. I have never stopped learning and I’m never going to either,” she says.
Learning and staying curious is at the core of Asher’s approach to cooking. She’s always excited about learning new recipes and exploring new cuisines and then sharing them with her audience. Those engaging with her on the internet have embraced her as their “baa” or “dadi” and shower her with much love and acceptance. “Everyone, whether girl or boy, should be able to cook at least a roti, sabji, dal and chawal for themselves. Wherever you go in life, you should be able to feed yourself basic food at least,” she advices. And you can learn all the basics and so much more through her videos.
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While learning cooking is an essential life skill everyone should have, feeding others comes with a sense of joy and deep satisfaction. It’s something 71-year-old Pratibha Kanoi has experienced all her life. She started cooking in her college days, after spending her childhood observing her mother cook. Since she got married, her husband has insisted on eating food made with her hands. And her children used to ask her to pack two lunchboxes for school because their friends would invariably dip into theirs, enamoured as they were with her food. “I don’t understand why people praise my food so much. I sell pizzas and pastas and I’m not sure why it has become so popular. I call it the miracle of God,” she says.
By founding Mommy’s Kitchen, which specialises in the two Italian dishes, Kanoi has fulfilled a four-decade-long dream of wanting to do something in life. It was during COVID that the family came together and started the brand. They began by purchasing 10 pizza boxes but were soon getting over a hundred orders a day. “Me, my house staff, my two sons and daughters-in-law, my grandson, everyone came together to make those pizzas,” she recalls. Today, she has a presence in Mumbai, with cloud kitchens in Bengaluru and Kolkata, and plans to open cloud kitchens in more locations. Among her customers are Amitabh Bachchan, Akshay Kumar, Ayushmann Khurana and Sonali Bendre.
While the business started in lockdown, she has been preparing for it, in a way, for 40 years. It was then that her husband gifted her an oven that she was instantly fascinated with, lovingly baking pizzas for her family. “It feels so nice to be an entrepreneur. What’ the point of sitting all day and gossiping or watching forwards on WhatsApp? It feels so nice to be doing something, especially since people are loving it,” she says.
While living within a capitalist societal structure, it can be some comfort to realise that we have the choice to be patrons to such family businesses instead of large corporate chains. It’s food that is comforting, wholesome and deeply delicious. And especially exciting — if you don’t have access to your own grandmothers’ cooking.
