When Vijai Gupta arrived in Canada from his native India in 1959 to study chemical engineering at McGill University, he soon realized there wasn't a morsel of Indian food to be found. He quickly became a gastronomic adventurer, sampling cheap delicacies he could afford on a student budget that he had never tried before, such as Hungarian goulash.
Fast-forward to the 1970s. His wife, Jyoti, wanted to start a home-based business to use her nutrition degree while watching over their two children, Anjali and Anuj. So in 1979, while living in Houston, the couple founded JYOTI Cuisine India, named after his wife, and began outsourcing the canning of foods based on Jyoti's recipes. A year later, Gupta, then a scientist at Atlantic Richfield Co., was transferred to the Philadelphia area and brought the food business along. In Their food business took off and by 1997, they moved from his house to the site of a former mushroom cannery.
The road to profitability hasn't been easy. JYOTI was sued after people found pebbles in with their chickpeas and other beans. To solve the problem, Gupta invented bean-cleaning technology that since has been patented and licensed to other food processors.
Last year, Gupta said sales at his Berwyn, Pa.-based company rose 50 percent to $3 million. (It's now owned by the couple's holding company, Gourmail Inc., with Jyoti listed as president.) Now the company, called JYOTI Natural Foods, which provides vegetarian meals to US Airways and British Airways, is launching its first meat product, chicken curries to compliment its vegetarian products.
Q: When you arrived in Canada as a student in 1959, was there any Indian food to be found?
A: There were no restaurants, no Indian grocery stores, and so on. ... I would go all over Montreal to find cheap, good food like Hungarian goulash, for $1.25 (for) the whole meal. ... I went to an Italian restaurant and tried to put some sugar in a cup of tea. ... It turned out it was Parmesan cheese.
Q: How did your business get started?
A: In 1979, my wife received a master's degree in nutrition. ... She didn't want to go and work outside the home. At that time, Indian food really wasn't [widely] available, so I said she could do a business from home. ..
Q: What were the challenges?
A: It really did not take off until 1997. Because we used to get our food made by other companies, what was happening was, they didn't do Indian food very well. I decided to build our own factory in 1995.
Q: How difficult was it to get the spices right? What about the beans?
A: If you put the same amount of spices in canned food that you would by cooking it fresh, it would be inedible. The spices would overwhelm one another. ... Beans always have farmland debris [like pebbles]. We got so many complaints that I told my wife that I was going to build the plant.
Q: Did the problem threaten your business?
A: The machine that we used to clean the beans, which was state-of-the-art at the time, didn't do such a good job -- it wasn't that we didn't clean the beans. Our insurance company settled with at least four people.
Q: You faced another challenge when your outside canner got a huge U.S. military order and stopped taking your orders.
A: It was a very sudden thing. [The canner] helped us out with the facility. ... They didn't just dump us.
Q: Why don't you target Indian markets?
A: Many years ago, we were the monopoly in shelf-stable foods [in Indian grocery stores]. Then the stores were able to import food directly from India that was much cheaper in price, but inferior in packaging and quality. We decided that we were not going to compete.
Q: Are you getting offers to sell out?
A: We get calls from very many brokers, but we aren't interested in selling. We have not been asking for anybody's money, because this way we have full control over what we do.
Q: Would you like your children to come into the business
A: They are fully educated. It would be left to their choice if they want to work here.
