Gourmet food retailers adapting 'forgotten' foods

Gourmet food retailers are adapting traditional forgotten foods such as bandel cheese, palm shoots and banana flowers, as the trend towards discovering local and healthier foods takes wing.

Bandel cheese, a premium gourmet cheese, is being adapted by retailers and chefs after a post by 19-year-old university student Karan Chawla went viral. The post by Chawla, a student of Ashoka University, cited chef and entrepreneur Sanjeev Kapoor’s discovery of the ancient and homegrown food product. “India can move up the value chain and give the world a cheese never tasted before and create a category in itself,” Chawla wrote in his LinkedIn post. Bandel cheese, known for its dry and crumbly texture, has its origins in Bandel, a neighbourhood in the Hooghly district. Introduced by the Portuguese, the cheese is made from chhena (or cottage cheese).

“Social media has the power to have a cascading impact in such discoveries; it’s very encouraging that youngsters are gathering attention to such trends which also have no entry level barriers,” said Sanjeev Kapoor, well-known chef and entrepreneur.

Gourmet food retailers such as Le’Marche, Foodhall and Nature’s Basket are also learnt to be planning standalone counters to sell heritage forgotten foods.

Not too long back, Meenakshi Boopathi, a software professional based in Bengaluru, started a Facebook page called Forgotten Foods, where she posted recipes and highlighted health benefits of forgotten Indian ingredients including edible flowers, butterfly pea and moringa. According to information on the facebook page, Boopathi along with seed-saver NGO Sahaja Samrudha and with funding from Nabard (the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development), released a calendar that showcased the fo ..

“We are planning to introduce many such foods in our stores and are in talks for directly sourcing these. We believe these will be a key differentiator for our stores,” said a senior executive at a leading food retail chain. He requested not to be named.