Meals to Order in from the Freezer Case
By Lorrie Baumann
Mona Ahmad knows what it’s like to come home from a demanding job to find a family looking at her and asking about dinner. She wanted to provide for her family the same kind of traditional meals that her mother had provided for her family through the years that the family had traveled from country to country as her father’s job as a United Nations diplomat required. “Everywhere we went my mother would make our delicious food,” Ahmad recalls. “It was such a blessing to have a variety of textures, flavors and aromas fill our home.” Those meals were rich with the complex flavors of Ahmad’s Pakistani heritage, and her mother had spent hours cooking them through the day. Ahmad had the skills her mother had taught her, but as a manager at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, she just didn’t have that kind of time. “Our food is one of the most difficult cuisines – it’s very labor intensive and requires a multitude of ingredients,” she said. “It wasn’t very easy for me to make a home-cooked meal all the time.”
The solution she came up with was her own version of a meal kit – she put together packages of food with all the ingredients prepared for cooking and froze them. “I just wished it could be more prepped – something that maybe even my husband could start,” she said. “Have it frozen and ready, so that you just defrost and cook on the stovetop and then eat…. It was a need I had, and I found out that I was not alone.”
Those frozen meals came in particularly handy as Ahmad made meals to take to her father. “He also had a friend who used to have someone make food for him, but one week the lady was sick,” she said. “I gave him a few of my meals, and, voila, he was cooking on his own, and his pain point for food diminished.”
She started talking to people about her idea, and some of them told her that they’d love to have some of those meals, too, and so would their children who’d left home to go to college but were often homesick for an honest-to-gosh home-cooked meal.
Somewhere in all those conversations, Ahmad discerned a real need in the marketplace – a lot of people wanted to eat the kind of food that she had grown up eating, but they didn’t have the time or the skills or even the ingredients to prepare it for themselves. “I started looking at statistics and found that most people would like a home-cooked meal but wanted meal prep to be easier, and, now more than ever, people are facing meal prep fatigue,” she said. “Also, there is no skillet meal right now that represents cuisine from this region. This was an opportunity that I saw, and it just evolved.”
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“It took a while to launch because I was juggling kids and being a sole proprietor,” she said. “Also, I wanted to sell to grocery stores, so I needed a USDA factory [a facility certified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to handle meat processing] – I couldn’t just make it out of my kitchen. I couldn’t even make it out of a commercial kitchen.”
Once she had those wrinkles ironed out, she started field-testing Mona’s Curryations, the brand she adopted for her products, to gauge how the market responded. “What we learned is that people enjoy making this cuisine at home. They like that it’s all natural, and that it tastes so fresh,” she said. “They were pleasantly surprised because they were getting it from the freezer aisle.”
Gradually, her nascent line was picked up by small, ethnic grocery stores. Ahmad marketed it tirelessly with advertisements on Facebook, publicity in the Boston Globe, putting the word out among friends and family and at her local mosque. “Wherever I could advertise that we had this product, I did,” she said.
As the market for Mona’s Curryations grew from early adopters who got the frozen skillet meals from Boston’s ethnic markets to new customers who didn’t share Ahmad’s heritage and shopped for their food in supermarkets, Ahmad adapted her offerings to fit the tastes of a wider spectrum of consumers – those who wanted fresh-tasting meals that they could prepare easily at home but who weren’t familiar with the nuances of Ahmad’s Pakistani cuisine.
The Mona’s Curryations line now consists of Chicken Tikka Masala, Palak Paneer, Chickpea Tikka Masala and Tandoori Chicken. They’re made with fresh, natural ingredients, and the meats are halal. The Chickpea Tikka Masala is vegan, and the Tandoori Chicken is dairy free. The 22-ounce packages are intended to serve two with full meal servings, and they include the naan. They retail for about $9.99. “These restaurant-inspired meals are complete with the protein; vegetables; oil; and spices such as turmeric, fenugreek, garam masala and cumin. Everything is mixed in the bag so that you can enjoy the experience of making and eating this cuisine right in the comfort of your home,” Ahmad said. “You just need a skillet or a saucepan. Pour everything in and let it cook for about 10 minutes and warm up the naan. Multi-cooker instructions are also included.”
Ahmad is expecting to have her line ready to roll out into supermarkets this fall, and she expects it to appeal to consumers who are still doing most of their eating at home, whether or not the pandemic continues to rage. She expects the line to launch regionally in New England first, with plans to scale up as distribution and retail arrangements progress.
For more information, visit www.monascurryations.com.
Chosen Foods Launches Guacamole and Salsa for Refrigerated Case
Chosen Foods, which makes, 100 percent pure avocado oil, cooking sprays, mayos, dressings and simmer sauces, announces the launch of its first ever refrigerated products — a collection of four new guacamole and salsa items.
Featuring hand scooped 100 percent Hass avocados and only the simplest ingredients, all of the new products are balanced in flavor while bringing in subtle spicy notes. Never using preservatives or stabilizers, the new line of guacamole and salsa is certified Non-GMO, kosher and high pressure processed to lock in freshness. The product line-up features Classic Guacamole, Spicy Guacamole, Avocado Mash and Avocado Tomatillo Salsa.
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Avocado Mash is an easy grab-and-go snack or topper for avocado toast. Made with lime juice, salt, ground black better and Hass avocado, it has just four ingredients and retails for $4.99 for the four-pack of 2-ounce cups. Avocado Tomatillo Salsa is made with fresh tomatillos and jalapeño pepper for a creamy, balanced condiment that retails for $5.99 for 12 ounces.
“This project has been a labor of love for our team here at Chosen Foods” said Chief Executive Officer Gabriel Perez Krieb. “We’ve had our eyes on the guacamole space for a while now, and for over 12 months we worked tirelessly across the organization to deliver a fresh, flavorful and creamy guacamole line that, like our avocado oil, always provides the highest quality to our consumers. We couldn’t be more excited to release these products, just in time for summer!”
Saffron Road Challenges Plant-Based Exuberance
By Lorrie Baumann
Saffron Road is launching frozen and shelf-stable meal entrees designed to appeal to consumers who read the backs of packages before the items go into their baskets. The new frozen products include Shawarma Chicken with Lentil Rice; Thai Red Curry Chicken with Jasmine Rice; and Thai Basil Noodles with Grass-fed Beef. The two shelf-stable vegetarian options are Chickpea Masala and Delhi Potatoes, known in India as Aloo Mattar.
In addition, Saffron Road has three new varieties of its Crunchy Organic Chickpeas: Toasted Coconut, Sea Salt & Cracked Pepper and Buffalo. They’ll all be reaching grocers’ shelves and freezer cases in May or June of this year.
The introductions come as more consumers are looking for plant-based meal options, driving growth of the category by 31 percent over the past two years, so that the retail market for plant-based foods is now worth almost $4.5 billion, according to research by the Good Food Institute and the Plant-Based Foods Association. Some of that growth reflects enthusiasm for the plant-based meat alternatives that have come onto the market over the past year or two, and according to Deloitte, a large number of companies are now investing heavily in acquiring and creating new products and brands that will appeal to the surging consumer demand for plant-based products.
Saffron Road Chief Executive Officer Adnan Durrani says that you can count him and Saffron Road out of the rush to create plant-based products designed to mimic meat and dairy. He points out that although the market for vegan and plant-based products is growing at a fast clip, those products still represent less than 1 percent of the frozen meals segment in the American market overall. Although the plant-based meals category grew by 6 percent last year – “a good number,” Durrani admits, that still represents only $387 million in sales, compared to the $40 billion frozen meat entree market. “So it still is a drop in the bucket, and even if it grows 500 percent, it’s still a drop in the bucket,” he said.
He suspects that the current market enthusiasm for the plant-based meat alternatives that he calls “fake” may run into a ditch once consumers start asking more questions about them. Durrani points out that the vegetable-based meat substitutes are actually made from protein components isolated from the vegetables in which they originated, and he suspects that human beings will find that their nutrition is better served by eating whole vegetables rather than protein isolates that have been processed with preservatives, additives and fillers into something that suggests meat-like texture and flavor.
“Consumers should not be told that fake foods are any better for you than real whole plant-based foods or the meat products they’re replacing,” he said. “Our feeling at Saffron Road is that clean foods, plant-based or not – and certainly plant-based – should not contain highly-processed ingredients with complex, alien names.”
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While those ingredients are certified by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as safe to consume, “safe” doesn’t mean “healthy,” Durrani insists. “The promotion of them being healthy or natural is not yet factually proven…. Everybody’s spidey-sense around transparency should be on alert.”
Instead, Saffron Road is reaching into the culinary traditions of vegetarian cuisine and into frozen entrees that include meat but are made with transparently sourced, clean ingredients and traditional recipes. “Our vegetarian products at Saffron Road have found a sweet spot for discerning consumers that are looking for a healthier vegetarian diet,” Durrani said. “Our brand promise at Saffron Road is always to go that extra mile in terms of culinary excellence and clean-label foods.”
The new Chickpea Masala is packed in a pouch and sold from the grocer’s shelf. The meal serves two and is prepared by heating it for 60 seconds. “We use very high quality, premium-quality, authentically sourced ingredients like non-GMO chickpeas,” Durrani said. “Everything we do is made in small batches, not highly processed.” The Chickpea Masala is so delicious that it has become the Saffron Road staff’s top choice for their own consumption, he said.
The Delhi Potatoes are a traditional Indian vegetarian dish known as Aloo Mattar in India. Like the Chickpea Masala, it’s ready in just 60 seconds and non-GMO verified. “It’s like a comfort food. It’s wonderful either for lunch or for dinner,” Durrani said. “These are clean-label plant-based protein foods that have been sourced from clean whole plant-based protein – and are made using the most traditional, authentic recipes.”
Saffron Road’s new frozen entrees include its recently launched Madras Curry with Meatballs in addition to the Thai Red Curry Chicken with Jasmine Rice; and Thai Basil Noodles with Grass-fed Beef. The company will also soon be introducing a Coconut Curry. “I think that’s is going to do extremely well,” Durrani said. Those new products will begin shipping to retailers in May.
With the new Shawarma Chicken with Lentil Rice, Saffron Road is venturing into Middle Eastern cuisine, a decision that Durrani said was based on consumer interest in that cuisine. “It’s a shawarma-style chicken with lentil rice. It’s really amazing,” he said. “That’s going to be our debut into the Middle Eastern sector in terms of frozen entrees, so we’re pretty excited about that.”
