FACES OF CHANGE
While Rebecca Vaz, Director, Production and Marketing at Bhuira Jams, is the new face of an old favourite, Dildeep Kalra, Director, Massive Restaurants, is giving a modern spin to traditional Indian cuisine. 12 women who are changing the food buisness.
12 enterprising women who are transforming the food industry
If you’ve grown up in India, it’s unlikely that your tiffin in school wasn’t packed with jam sandwiches at one time or another. The jam overflowed onto everything—chunks of fruit clinging to your fingers as it clumsily snuck out of the crusts with every bite, a different colour everyday—orange for marmalade, a bright and happy red for strawberry, amber for apple. This sticky spread of joy carries on through adulthood, as breads get fancier and we consume chewy, buttered sourdough toast for breakfast, transporting eager eaters down memory lane or into fruity summers with fresh apple-cinnamon jelly. Though Kissan was most widely known for their mixed fruit jam, one of India’s oldest relationships with assorted variations of the relish dates back to 1991, when English-born Linnet Mushran decided to turn a cottage in Bhuira, a charming agrarian village in Himachal Pradesh, into her very own jam kitchen, and subsequently, factory. The cottage, incidentally, had been built by principal secretary to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, P N Haksar, Linnet’s husband Viney’s maternal uncle. Instantly enamoured by the house with a one-acre orchard, Mushran bought the property and made it her own, using her experience of making preserves with the seasonal produce of Somerset in England to her advantage. She was good at creating magic from dust—her time in the village of Gomia, now Jharkhand, when her husband worked at the explosives factory ICI, saw Linnet opening schools and hosting festivals, when none existed. Visit her son in Mumbai, actor Ashwin Mushran, and he’ll regale you with stories from the village and take you through its history—with pictures of Linnet in her younger years and the little village she helped educate, engage and entertain—in a coffee table book.
Similarly, with Bhuira, what started as an experiment with her mother’s recipes for friends and neighbours, and a corner shop in Kasauli (on the recommendation of her friend Fori Nehru, wife of Diplomat B K Nehru), is now a widely retailed, homegrown product, employing 19 women full-time from the village and several others on daily wages. Eleven years ago, she struck a deal with Fabindia, which continues to sell Bhuira to this day, with 25 per cent of the company’s sales being brought about by the store. Mushran is now 76, and instead of selling the company to interested investors, will be handing over the reins to her daughterin-law Rebecca Vaz, who currently runs the operations. Vaz is carrying forward the legacy as Director of Production and Marketing, but mixing the flavours of the traditional with the modern, calculated business decisions with creative and innovative recipes to expand the brand and find shelf space in a swiftly growing competitive market. Today Bhuira, with a turnover of `2.4 crore, manufactures 33 products categorised as jams, jellies, marmalades, crushes and chutneys sold across ten cities and online.
“She (Linnet) fell ill in between,” says Vaz. “A lot of investors came in at that point. Every time we would talk to them we would realise that one of the main reasons for the business was to create employment opportunities for the women,” she says. Vaz’s entry into the business assuaged the insecurities the introduction of an outsider would create for these women who had for years considered Bhuira Jams more than just their bread and butter.
Vaz grew up in Bandra, Mumbai, in a family of musicians—a home filled with jazz, Bollywood and feasts. She was busy honing her passion for entrepreneurship, learning a variety of skills during her summer vacations and spending her time in the kitchen with her mother, whipping up baked treats. “During the holidays, we would do one week of vacation somewhere. But the rest of it, we always had to join a course,” she says. It was variety too that later defined her professional life; she graduated from St Andrews College in Bandra with a degree in bachelors of management studies (BMS), dabbled in advertising with Percept Dmark, was a flight attendant with Air India and combined her two biggest passions— baking and business—when she started The Baking Tray (TBT) in 2009. “I started doing between three and four theme cakes a day. People could tell me anything they wanted on the cakes. There were very few people in Mumbai who were doing that when I started out,” she says. But baking from home meant her husband, Ashwin, whom she married in 2008, a year before she started TBT, would wake up to elaborate wedding cakes taking up more space in their Santa Cruz home than was acceptable, so she found herself a central space to function out of. But before she could set up her kitchen, Vaz was called into battle. She fell seriously ill and was diagnosed with lymphoma. “I had to give back my rental space. It broke my heart. But I had a positive attitude, I said I’ll do the chemo and I’ll work. But my body didn’t let me,” she recalls. However, Vaz fought hard and strong, and after six months of chemotherapy, three months of radiation, in all of one year, she had combated cancer, and procured her next space.
This is the spirit with which Vaz approaches her professional life as well, taking trips to Bhuira every month without fail, forming bonds with the “happy mountain women” who make the company and putting her experience and expertise into every aspect of the business. “Most of our processes are by hand. Only in the last year have we installed semi-automatic machinery to assist with filling, capping and labelling,” she says. “The cutting of the fruit and making of the jam is still a handmade process which is dependent on the skill and training of the women of Bhuira.” Aside from upping the quantity, she is also working on a systematic programme so that their products evolve with the demands of an increasingly health conscious demographic. “I think jam is mostly consumed by children. A lot of mothers are choosing to buy this (Bhuira) instead of a pureed product where you don’t know what there is inside,” she says. She adds, “Habits have been changing, people are conscious about sugar—and that’s one of the things we’re taking into consideration and thinking of doing jams with no added sugar.” From an aggressive plan for social media marketing, as well as retailing online and tying up with delivery company Delhivery to ship across the country, Bhuira under the aegis of Vaz is growing surely and steadily. And with it, so are the women of Bhuira.