Sauces, dips, pastes: These restaurants are packaging their signature tastes for home delivery

From Red Bell Pepper-Heirloom Tomato Sauce to Szechuan Peppercorn Sauce, fine-dining restaurants began packaging a range of dips, sauces and pastes as traditional sources of income dried up during the pandemic months. (Representational image: Anshu A via Unsplash)

Food delivery became an important pillar of the restaurant business during the pandemic. Even as weekend curfews and successive waves played truant, we ordered in more than ever before and we cooked more than ever before.

RedSeer Consulting and Research reported a 61 percent rise in consumer spending on home cooking in 2020. According to a more recent report, the ready-to-cook market in India is set to grow by $451.57 million from 2021 to 2026.

Traditionally, the restaurant industry has looked down upon the idea of packaged sauces, pastes, DIYs - these have firmly been in the FMCG or cottage industry space. Unless you didn’t mind the mass-produced Ching’s or Veeba, your hunt for a reliable soy or pasta sauce would typically take you to a cottage industry exhibition where some home chef would have set up their pop-up for the duration of the event.

The pandemic changed this. Restaurants recognised rather quickly that they needed to evolve to have any hope of surviving. Fine dining restaurants that had until then turned up their noses to even home delivery, embraced the idea and began curating special menus that could go the distance.

The restaurant industry, not unlike the hospitality industry, is very traditional in the way it operates; its revenue streams are thus just as conservative. With the pandemic, however, restaurants had to look to multiply their revenue streams. It wasn’t long before they discovered that they could quite literally sell their secret sauce.

To be sure there is no way a restaurant’s dish can be replicated 100 percent at home; there’s a reason why not all of us are chefs. And yet, as we emerged from the third wave into something resembling normalcy, we did so having gathered new food experiences right in the comfort of our homes, thanks in part to the wide range of delivery options that were available to us and in part because cooking at home became more common.

Restaurants are recognising this and are now packaging their trademark sauces, pastes, and even cocktail mixes so their customers can bring home the flavours of their favourite restaurants.

Sequel, an organic farm-to-table café, started by creating ‘farm boxes’ comprising fresh organic produce that they used themselves. The boxes contained condiments and recipe cards that helped buyers recreate some of Sequel’s trademark dishes at home. Eventually, they expanded their offerings to include Basil Walnut Pesto, Caper Parsley Basil Sauce, Red Bell Pepper-Heirloom Tomato Sauce and Tahini.

“The idea was to enable our customers to whip up a quick, delicious and wholesome meal at home. And it’s much easier to do so when your fridge is stocked with a wide variety of condiments and sauces,” says Vanika Choudhary, founder of Sequel and the newly launched Noon.

(Image via Sequel)

The folks behind Nino Foods, better known for their burgers and their newly launched pizza brand, Flash, were quick to act on the feedback they got from their sales. After selling over 20,000 pizzas in January 2022 alone, they began retailing their pizza sauces. Buy a base from the local grocer, spread the sauce, add toppings of your choice and you’re good to go.

“FMCG allows us to cater to a new fast-growing channel – that of home cooking of pizzas and pastas,” says Nishant Jhaveri, founder of Nino Foods. “Importantly, we discovered that during the pandemic people found cooking to be therapeutic. They also like to experiment. Trending recipe formats on social media platforms has only amplified this need to curate and create one's own experiences from the kitchen and upload them.”

Also retailing its pizza and pasta sauces is Sorrentina. Being part of Food Hall, this was perhaps the most logical next step for the gourmet pizza diner. While some Sorrentina products were being retailed even pre-Covid, the pandemic provided the necessary push to make a serious move in the direction of retail.

“Covid gave us an opportunity to dive in and experiment with scaling,” says Sorrentina Executive Chef Aabhas Malhotra. “We realised the true potential (of retailing our sauces and pastes) and while it did serve as a pivot strategy for many restaurants, to us it was a natural progression.”

Sorrentina’s website offers options for not just sauces but also DIY kits and breads, among other things.

Fine-dining restaurants weren’t far behind either. Karyna Bajaj, who runs Yauatcha, launched their signature sauces as retail offerings. These sauces are handmade, small-batch and as exclusive as the restaurant itself. Bajaj says that the line of products, one that lends itself best to tossed dishes emerged as much from the growing need to cook at home as it did from the need to look to a new revenue stream.

Keenan Tham of Foo, yet another fine-dining restaurant, echoes this sentiment. “Throughout the lockdown we were delivering select sauces to our regular guests anyway,” he says, “That’s what sparked the idea of retailing them through our delivery partners too.”

Like Yauatcha, Foo’s sauces are of the dipping and tossing variety: think Sichuan peppercorn sauce and spicy chilly jalapeno sauce, etc. “Our need for retailing sauces purely came from the space of fulfilling our customers’ cravings. People order our sauces because they love a little bit of Foo at home,” Tham says.