Beer and biryani on the menu

Monish Bali

That good food and wine (or beer) are best paired together is hardly anything new, but when Mount Shivalik hedges its bets in the wine and dine business, you know it's on to something serious.

For years a leader in the beer business with its Alwar- and Chandigarh-based beer breweries (the third largest in India with five-and-a-half million cases), Mount Shivalik  Industries has been attempting a toe-hold in the food business in the last year, and now seems to have taken the plunge with the heat-and-eat packaged foods brand Jashn.

Jashn has already been soft-launched in parts of Delhi, but penetration should increase this month. The range of eight Indian curries will soon become available in markets as diverse as Mumbai, Kolkata, Chandigarh and Jaipur where marketing set-ups are in place.

By this time next year, it aims to be in stores in most metros and mini-metros in the country.

It's the reason Monish Bali, executive director, would disappear from his office at odd hours to the contract factory in Alwar where for eight months he supervised all samplings, often pitching in to cook himself.

"Food is a passion for me," he admits, "which is why though we've sourced recipes from regional cooks, I've personally done all the tastings instead of leaving it to professionals."

But before Jashn was launched, Bali had already tested the palate with two restaurant chains. The first, O'Briens, an international soup and sandwich brand, is up and running in Delhi and Gurgaon, and Bali says that sub-franchising for other markets is on the cards.

The other is Thunder Point (after its bestselling beer), a resto-bar with live cooking stations and draft beer, on the Delhi-Jaipur and Delhi-Chandigarh highway mid-points and close to its breweries.

There's some suggestion that Thunder Point may launch on the Delhi-Agra highway and, some time in future, on the Mumbai-Pune expressway.

"I enjoy cooking," says Bali, a Page 3 regular on Delhi's party circuit, "mostly teppenyakis and kebabs. I even do the marinations and make the sauces myself." But cooking at home and creating parameters for recipes for packaging involve very different styles.

To retain a shelf-life of a year, the semi-cooked food is retorted at extremely high temperatures. This requires the cooking to an extent where it is not pulped in the process, or left under-cooked.

"That's why perfecting the recipes took so long," says Bali. "We had to be careful to cook the food only about 70 per cent, so the rest could be cooked in the process of retortion."

The choice was equally important. There were already ready-to-eat packaged foods in the Rs 25-30 crore market segment, starting with the premium Kitchens of India from ITC, consisting of house specialities from its Bukhara, Dum Pukht and Dakshin restaurant kitchens. Then there were brands like Ashirwad, Kohinoor and the near-ubiquitous MTR.

"I decided on north Indian, regional specialities," explains Bali, as his USP. This included recipes from Punjab, Kashmir and Rajasthan, all in the Rs 45-85 range. Its Dal Pakhtoon, which is a take-off from the popular Dal Bukhara from the Kitchens of India brand, replicated it in being a North-West Frontier recipe instead of the more usual dal makhani.

The range contains some non-vegetarian foods, while a Hyderabadi chicken biryani remains on the cards. "We've tried several recipes, but I haven't found anything yet that manages to capture both the aroma and flavour of a really good biryani," says Bali.

Bali would like Jashn placed in the same quality bracket as Kitchens of India but in a value-for-money price range, thereby eliminating the other players from what it calls the mid-range.

Promotions for the brand are just beginning to kick off and include shop sampling at kiosks, in-shop schemes of free gifts, print advertising and radio spots on cookery shows.

"MTR is a leading brand, particularly with its south Indian products," confirms Bali, "and Kitchens of India too does great volumes, but we should get there in a year's time. You can be sure that Jashn will be a substantial part of the market share by this time next year."

Possibly, though, Bali's greatest competition isn't the packaged foods themselves but the dial-a-takeaway, the upgraded dhabas that are now part of every neighbourhood. Bali's not buying that, however.

"Hygiene will always be an issue for the middle class," he says, "besides packaged foods are convenience foods and, in the case of Jashn, they are speciality foods in the same price parameter."

But with the ready-to-eat market segment growing at 40-45 per cent annually, Bali has some more aces up his sleeve. While he's exploring "" but not yet committing "" to meal-combo packs, the next to enter the market under his label could be a range of Lebanese appetisers (humus, tahini, dips), desserts (he's experimenting with phirni) and later, Chinese and Thai curries and combo-meals.

To go with his food, there's always the beer where, again, he says Mount Shivalik is open to international players (other than Stroh's, which it already has) "but for tie-ups, not sell-outs "" after all, it is our main business".

And its Blue Nun wine from Germany, though not considered "serious" by global oenophiles, has created enough of a buzz to be number one in Chandigarh, and is fairly well regarded in the Indian market. Clearly, it's time for a party on the house at Mount Shivalik.