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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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.