Indian frozen food becoming hot business in U.S.

Wednesday, 03 September 2003, 19:30 IST
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WASHINGTON: Be it curries or biryanis, nicely packaged, frozen Indian food is fast turning into a hot business in the U.S. From owning mom and pop food joints, and graduating into delivering dhaba-style meals to newcomers, the older generation of Indian immigrants have turned to marketing frozen curries and biryanis, and have suddenly become part of the $2.2 billion "ethnic" market. The Indian family-owned business is now one of the fastest-growing segments of the U.S. frozen-food industry. It all began a decade ago when two Indian immigrant couples, Bhagwati Amin and her husband Arvind of New Jersey, and Ranbir S. "Paul" Jaggi and his wife Sangeeta from Boston, Massachusetts, ran two food operations. They slowly turned to packaging their homemade meals and delivering them from small kitchens to grocery stores in Indian neighbourhoods. The next step they took was to freeze the palak paneer and vegetable korma prepared for their restaurants and sell them as packaged dinners under the brand name Taj Gourmet and Deep Foods at a local natural-food store. Today the Amin family's Deep Foods Inc., the Jaggi family's Ethnic Gourmet, and other niche frozen-food companies specialising in Mexican, Chinese and Thai cuisine have seen unexpected success, according to a detailed report in the Washington Post. Deep Foods has grown into a 70,000-square-foot Indian snack, ice cream and frozen food powerhouse. It can make 20,000 frozen entrees a day in 70 varieties, said Arvind Amin, the company's president. Paul Jaggi's Framingham, Massachusetts venture has grown at an even faster pace. Three years ago, he and his wife sold their brand to giant food producer H.J. Heinz for an undisclosed amount. Paul, now general manager of Heinz's ethnic-food division, is planning to add Cuban and Vietnamese dinners to Ethnic Gourmet's established Indian, Thai and Chinese lines. "People are getting bored with the same baked-potato-and-hamburger stuff," said Paul, who moved from New Delhi in 1987. In 2001, the frozen ethnic-food sector grew in double digits. The sale of Mexican entrees grew 20.6 percent, to $488 million. Figures for Asian entrees, which include Indian fare, climbed 12.3 percent, to $463 million. In the food industry, "ethnic" is hot, according to a survey by Supermarket News. This has helped propel the Indian frozen-food market, said Archit Amin, Bhagwati and Arvind's son and marketing and sales manager for Deep Foods. His wife, brother and sister-in-law are also company executives. The company's growth was spurred in the 1990s by the increased number of single Indian men coming to the U.S. on H-1B work visas to work for tech companies, he said. In that decade, the Indian population in the U.S. more than doubled to 1.9 million, according to the 2000 census. "There were bachelors coming over from India" who didn't know how to cook, Amin said. "We make it just like mom in the kitchen," Bhagwati Amin said. "Whatever she put in, we put in." Indian food companies are helped by the existence of a demand for Indian vegetarian dishes that goes beyond émigrés. Deep Foods recently developed the Green Guru label for the mainstream vegetarian market. The company's spicy Mirch Masala line is targeted at the Indian community. It attracts the second generation who want mom's cooking but without the hassle. The preparation and packaging is at once simple and intricate, say Arvind and Bhagwati, who both came from Gujarat over three decades ago and now own a modern plant where the cooking, preparation and packaging is done on a wholesale basis. They also use the $4 million packaging machine they had bought eight months ago. The machine squirts palak paneer into 10-ounce plastic containers, four at a time, sifting out dinners that are underweight. The conveyor belt pushes them into a flash freezer. Forty-five minutes later, the packages come out frozen solid. The machine seals the containers airtight with plastic, boxes them and applies a bright-red sticker to the outside -- $1.99. Simple though it may sound, it has spelt big business for ethnic Indian food
Source: IANS
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