Chitra Agrawal can still taste her aunt’s lemon achaar. As a child, she would suck on the lemon rind in the traditional South Asian pickled condiment. The achaars she grew up with reflected her family’s roots: mustard oil and root vegetables from her dad’s North Indian heritage, and sesame oil and sour ingredients such as tomato, tamarind and gooseberries from her mother’s South Indian roots.
Achaar is a staple in many South Asian pantries. But Agrawal saw that, unlike international condiments such as kimchi and harissa, it was unfamiliar to many non-desi Americans. She also saw a gap affecting fellow South Asians: she said many Indian stores in the U.S. carried achaars that were high in sodium or laden with preservatives.
Both gaps became the foundation for Brooklyn Delhi, the food company she launched in 2014 with her husband, Ben Garthus.
From family recipes to Brooklyn pop-ups
Agrawal’s path to launching Brooklyn Delhi grew out of years she spent blogging about her family’s food traditions, hosting cooking classes and organizing pop-up dinners. She adapted the food she grew up eating to seasonal produce local to the New York area. Agrawal also collaborated with chefs on cross-cultural meals, including Indian-Chinese and Indian-Mexican supper clubs. In the process, she developed her own versions of achaar.
The business began, as and is still largely, a two-person operation: Agrawal developed the recipes, while Garthus, who had experience working in food packaging design, helped create the brand. For the first few years, Agrawal would make the achaars in a soup pantry in Brooklyn and sell them at markets around the city.
When they began taking online orders, Agrawal packed them on a table in a closet in their Prospect Heights apartment and walked them to the post office.
Agrawal’s food blog had already given her a community of people interested in her cooking. Selling at Smorgasburg and other city markets put the products in front of new customers and food writers. Some specialty store owners discovered the company through press coverage.
Other opportunities came from simply walking into stores with samples. That’s how Brooklyn Delhi got into its first Whole Foods Market. After a visit, the chain’s local “forager” eventually contacted her, and Brooklyn Delhi became a featured local vendor when the Williamsburg store launched.
Agrawal later showcased their products at the Fancy Food Show in New York and California, putting Brooklyn Delhi in front of buyers from retailers such as Sprouts.
Teaching shoppers about achaar
However, getting the products into the big leagues meant they could be seen by many more shoppers – but didn’t mean those shoppers knew what they were looking at. Agrawal recognized the need for in-store cooking demonstrations – but that was something the small startup couldn’t regularly afford.
Brooklyn Delhi’s partnership with Blue Apron helped. In 2017, the meal-kit company began buying large quantities of Brooklyn Delhi’s achaar in branded sachets, introducing the product directly to consumers. The collaboration also showed how achaar could move beyond Indian dishes and transform everything from pizzas to a smash-burger aioli. The business has since expanded into plant-based simmer sauces, heat-and-eat meals and chutneys. Tikka masala is one of its grocery-store bestsellers.
Scaling without losing its essence
The business eventually grew beyond what Agrawal and Ben could produce themselves. Blue Apron alone sometimes required millions of units and specialized machinery. It wasn’t feasible for a bootstrapped two-person company to build its own facility, so Brooklyn Delhi began working with a manufacturing partner.
The company moved its operations to a manufacturing facility in the Hudson Valley in 2017. The couple moved nearby after she and Garthus had a baby. Affording family life in the city while running a business was tough.
Still, Brooklyn “is very much a part of both my story and the DNA of the company,” Agrawal said. She developed most of the brand’s products in the borough and still returns several times a month for meetings and events.
She and Garthus remain the company’s only full-time employees, working with contractors on marketing, finance and operations.
Despite Brooklyn Delhi’s scale, Agrawal said she never wanted to make achaar more marketable by giving it a more generic name or watering down its cultural specificity. When people didn’t recognize the condiment, she gave them an entry point by explaining what it is, showing them how to use it and making the flavors approachable. She took the same tack in her cookbook, “Vibrant India,” which centers on her mother’s South Indian recipes and Agrawal’s own twists.
“You can bring people along without losing the story, flavor or cultural context that made the food special in the first place,” Agrawal said.
