Duck roast, fish curry-tapioca ‘puzhukku’, cabbage ‘thoran’, wheat ‘payasam’… Kerala’s growing market for home-style, ready-to-eat food

How quickly can you put together a piping hot meal of rice, sambar and avial , teamed with pulinji and tender mango pickle, and finished with gothambu (wheat) and parippu (lentil) payasam? Give yourself 5 minutes.

When Kochi-based Tasty Nibbles Products launched a ready-to-eat Onasadya kit for Onam with this menu, it sold out within days. Customers just needed to pick these off a supermarket shelf, open the vacuum-sealed pouches or cans and heat the food, so these products are getting increasingly popular with time-hungry customers who crave familiar food.    

“The Malayali still prefers home-style food,” says Kochi-based Joseph Alappatt of Heat Eats. What better than the naadan version of the microwave dinner. 

While there is a large variety of ready-to-cook foods to choose from, be it biryani, dal makhni, noodles, pasta and even chicken kebab, typical, ready-to-eat Kerala food is a niche, but rapidly growing market according to people like Joseph and Cherian Kurian, Managing Director of HIC-ABF Special Foods Private Limited of which Tasty Nibbles is a part. While Joseph is a recent entrant in the sector, Tasty Nibbles has been making packaged Kerala food for eight-odd years. 

Cherian’s experience comes from his years in the packaged and frozen food business. The industry veteran started his company in 2001 and exports seafood, primarily tuna to Japan. Tasty Nibbles started with tuna, anchovy and sardine-based items such as meen-peera (fish in spiced, shredded coconut) besides kappa-puzhukku (tapioca), sambar, avial and a variety of traditional rice dishes, including tomato rice, coconut rice and pulao around eight years ago.

Earlier this year he exported about 3600 packs of fish biryani to Japan, where it was enthusiastically received. Since a large part of the company’s export is to Japan, Cherian says they have access to cutting-edge technology in the business with technicians being trained there. 

Tasty Nibbles added varieties of fish curry – in coconut milk, shappile (toddy shop) curry, with chilli, prawn mango curry – in January this year and the response has been enthusiastic. 

Gradual growth

Getting to the point where the 1, 000 Onam kits, priced ₹ 999, flew off the shelves has not been without its share of disappointments. “When we launched some of these products eight years ago the response was not encouraging, we may have been ahead of our times. Today, however, it is very different,” Cherian says.

He says that with more women in the workforce, there is very little time to cook elaborate meals and ready-to-eat meals are an advantage. Nostalgia too comes into play, especially with more people — younger, working people and students — living alone and away from home. Targeting home-sick Malayalis, his products are placed in cities such as Chennai, Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Delhi. These are also available online. Bangalore and Chennai are the two cities where the products sell the most.

Kochi-based Heat Eats and Currease have also jumped into the fray. Started eight months ago, Joseph Alappat’s Heat Eats is an offshoot of his food start-up, Stellar Creations, which is a caterer of continental cuisine. Recipes for chicken stew, pork pepper, rabbit roast, fish moilee besides vegetarian fare such as pineapple pulissery, cabbage thoran, ulli theeyal, and erissery are all family recipes.

The dishes are vacuum packed and stay up to six months or more if stored properly. “No preservatives added and if frozen, stays unspoilt. The quality and nutritional content stay intact,” says Joseph, who adds that he is working on changing mindsets on how frozen and packaged food is perceived. The food is blast-chilled, vacuum-packed in pouches and frozen. For now, Heat Eats delivers only in Kochi, where orders have increased enough for him to open a counter at Honey Pot, a cafe on the Thrikkakara-Pipeline road. A chunk of his customers are NRIs, who carry these pouches back with them; expanding to other cities in Kerala is part of his plans.     

A bite of nostalgia

Currease, unlike Tasty Nibbles and Heat Eats, which package ready-to-eat or heat-and-eat food, packages gravy for chicken, beef, egg, prawn and duck roast, chicken curry and more. Manu Martin says he launched Currease in April 2022, in an attempt to capture the authentic taste of his grandmother’s cooking. 

For instance, his grandmother’s duck roast recipe is a three-hour process, “even then the taste is not guaranteed. But with our gravy, it cuts down cooking time and the flavour is consistent,” Manu adds. His factory at the industrial estate in Kalamasserry packages up to 3000 packs daily and has a capacity of 7500. Besides being sold in stores in Kerala, Currease is available pan-India online.

Tasty Nibbles and Currease both use retort packaging tech, where food is packed at a temperature of 121 degrees centigrade and then rapidly cooled (does not need to be frozen). The high temperature sterilises food, and the principle is similar to pressure cooking. “The beauty is no refrigeration required, no preservatives as it is vaccumised packaging. Pre-cooked food goes into the pouches and then into the retort machine or autoclave. Most of the cooking happens inside the pouch,” says Cherian. The autoclave sterilizes food after it is packaged. 

Protein breakage and flavour loss are usually a concern when food is heated to high temperatures, “Retort technology has evolved, it is not the case anymore,” says Manu.   

The craving for home-style ready-to-eat or heat-and-eat food among those living outside the State is a given, but the reason for its popularity in Kerala is, as Cherian mentioned, a large number of people living away from their homes in Kerala. “And homemakers who may not feel like cooking. It is convenient, as our tagline says – pop it, heat it, eat it!”