Mandira’s Kitchen
Mandira’s Kitchen; an artisan food company based in the Surrey Hills is owned by Mum of one, Mandira Sarkar. The business now operates out of a 400 year old converted cowshed where Mandira’s team creates award winning homestyle Indian food including freezer meals, catering, cookery lessons and more but Mandira has a lovely story.
Mandira moved to the UK 20 years ago, knowing little regarding how to cook but recalls that she missed the cooking in India more than she missed her parents! She says “I spent the next 17 years working as a management consultant, bitterly complaining about the lack of proper Indian food until my job came to an end and I thought I’d do something my parents would disapprove of! No self respecting, educated Indian woman leaves a “proper “ job to cook for a living. So on a budget on £750 (which I invested in some traditional Indian platters – Thalis) I ran two supper clubs from my living room and within weeks I had generated enough interest to start catering for parties from my kitchen with my then cleaning lady (now chef!).”
Mandira had her daughter, Mahera, when she was working in the corporate world. “With both my husband and I travelling and no family in the UK, balancing a career and motherhood has always been a juggling act.” She set up the business when Mahara was in school and found it far more difficult than juggling a job because of how much more hands on and all consuming she found the business to be.
“My husband, fabulous though he is, worked overseas during week the coming home only for weekends. It has been hard and sometimes does make you feel guilty but with planning and complete openness and candour within the family, we have coped and get through it.
Mandira has always tried to involve her daughter in the business too; “Sometimes my daughte has resented the fact that the business has had to come before all else but now that she is older – started university last year, she understands and thankfully now comes home to help with the business.”
By the end of that first year of business, Mandira was creating homestyle freezer meals and selling to 6 local farm shops and the following year she built a small kitchen in her garden to fulfil demand. Just two years later, in 2019, she moved the operation to their current premises – a beautifully refurbished manufacturing kitchen, complete with a small outlet and held a launch event in May; “We had over 2000 people stopping by to try the samosas and we ran out by 2pm!”
Lockdown in 2020 year meant the events calendar and markets disappeared overnight but within days Mandira had changed her strategy to focus on freezer meals; investing in a new updated website to enable customers to order from any UK address.
“The last year has seen our business grown 3600%, we launched new products and services to offer a complete Indian meal experience: – samosas including gluten free samosas , pizza and chocolate samosas, – our range of locally made ice cream Indian flavours such as mango, fig and even lychee martini, – chutneys and spice tins.”
New services include the weekend Thalis – three course curated weekly menus complete with a Bollywood playlist and a quiz on India, bbq boxes etc.
Mandira now employs 14 women aged between 16 and 64, she says “our staff are mainly on a second career are not trained chefs and are all passionate about young enterprise. We have not had to furlough anyone – in fact we took on new staff. We are a no single use plastic site and buy within a 50 mile range as far as possible and our food, we use no preservatives or gluten and has any increasing vegan and dairy free range to meet new demand. Everything is packed in cardboard trays and the sleeves are not laminated.”
Over the past three years Mandira’s Kitchen have fed many thousands of people – folk like you and me but also Royal Visitors and celebrities! They have a string of awards too; GREAT BRITISH ENTREPRENEUR SOUTH EAST WINNER 2020, SMALLBIZ100 2020, SURREY LIFE FOOD PRODUCT OF THE YEAR 2019, and TOAST OF SURREY START UP OF THE YEAR 2018.
