Food startup begins journey with grandma’s recipes

Pushing aside fad diets and health monitors to track our daily dose of calories, traditional recipes and ingredients from our grandmothers’ kitchen are making a comeback and how. These locally sourced, authentic flavoured foods not only qualify as healthy but are also sustainable. And if one is able to build a brand out of these time-tested culinary heritage passed down generations, it literally amounts to dipping all your five fingers in ghee!

City-based young entrepreneur Gagandeep Singh Pahwa seems to be having quite a time with his home- grown brand, ‘Dadi’s Recipes’. A food technologist by profession, who previously worked with Nestle and other food industry bigwigs, Pahwa eventually found his purpose inside the kitchen in his home. He recently won a first prize of Rs 50,000 in the Open Category at the Future Tycoons of Amritsar for his food startup called ‘Dadi’s Recipes’, which uses naturally grown fruits and ingredients like dates and ghee to produce a line of organic sherbets and traditional sweets. What drove him to shun the mundane routine of his corporate job to start from scratch was the desire to share with the world the joy of relishing food that evokes a sense of home, nostalgia and tradition.

“It all began last summer, when my in-laws and I, as is the tradition in our family, decided to make traditional panjiri. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, which was when I first dabbled with the idea of cooking traditional sweets and savories at home, we make traditional Punjabi recipes like panjiri, gond laddoos and fruit sherbets at home. Last year, near Diwali, we decided to try and gift these homemade sherbets and sweets among friends and family. Their response was tremendous, given that these were organically sourced, home-made delicacies,” he says. That’s when ‘Dadi’s Recipes’ first began its entrepreneurial journey.

Months down the line, ‘Dadi’s Recipes’ is now already producing a line of seasonal fruit sherbets, traditional sweets using whole grains and other ingredients and they have also introduced chocolate laddoos for kids. Their USP? “We do not use white sugar in our products. We use dates and jaggery and all our products depend on seasonal availability of products. We have now started getting orders from overseas as there is a growing interest in nostalgia, driven by health benefits of these recipes,” says Pahwa.

Their customers are limited but loyal and drawn to their motto of not compromising on quality for quantity. Pahwa says that Amritsar has immense potential for food business, given that people here are passionate for food and flavours. “Food economy is what Amritsar is known for. The city has talent, knowledge, passion and entrepreneurial skill to become a global food business hub. We offer rich flavours and ingredients with an unmatched experience in terms of food tourism. Our recipes come with history.”

Amritsar