Inspired by his mums cooking a Leicester man quit his IT career and launched an online multi-million-pound business empire in meal kits.<\/p>\n
Ketan Varu used to have spicy curry kits sent to him by his mum when he was at Sheffield Hallam University 15 years ago which inspired him to launch his business Spicentice.<\/p>\n
The business, based in Craven Street, close to the Highcross shopping centre, Leicester, has gone on to sell more than three million spice kits offering a healthy and authentic taste of Indian family cooking.<\/p>\n
His packs include everything from chicken tikka masala spices to katsu curry kits, jalfrezi spices and balti kits.<\/p>\n
And they don\u2019t just cover Indian dishes. They also make kits for meals like Chinese and southern fried chicken, fajita, chilli con carne and paella.<\/p>\n
They now sell more than 1,000 packs a day, keeping 12 people in work and now supplies national retailers such as Ocado and Marks and Spencer.<\/p>\n
The business has been such a success that the whole family is now part of the team, Ketan\u2019s mum Manjula quit her sales assistant job at M&S to work with him, but she has been joined by his dad Ramnik, sister Tejal, and Ketan\u2019s wife Mita.<\/p>\n
Ketan\u2019s kits are gluten and additive free.<\/p>\n
The family has also benefited from a growing trend for families to shun ready meals and cook their dinners from scratch, partly inspired by the growing number of companies supplying complete, fresh meal kits online such as Hello Fresh and Gousto.<\/p>\n
Ketan said: \u201cWe wanted to share our love of cooking from scratch but we didn\u2019t want to limit ourselves to just Indian food because we love all kinds of different foods.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve had a great response from customers as we\u2019ve widened the product range with many telling us they are broadening their cooking skills thanks to Spicentice.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve just moved to bigger premises with a larger warehouse to process the increasing orders.<\/p>\n
\u201cMum and Dad are still involved with the company and are busier than ever which is great because our success started with their delicious recipes.\u201d<\/p>\n
As a student Ketan followed his mum\u2019s written recipes and his friends loved his cooking.<\/p>\n
Even when he went into IT he said colleagues told him his home-cooked lunches were brilliant.<\/p>\n
Now 42, he said: \u201cMum must\u2019ve thought I\u2019d starve as a student because she sent food parcels and little letters with recipes and bags of spices as soon as I\u2019d left home.<\/p>\n
\u201cI couldn\u2019t cook at all in those days but I followed mum\u2019s advice and soon I was able to enjoy a taste of home cooking while away at uni.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy housemates all commented on the lovely smells coming from the kitchen so it was only a matter of time before I started cooking up larger portions to share and pretty soon all of my student friends were asking if they could come to dinner.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone loved mum and dad\u2019s recipes.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt that stage I never dreamed it would become a business. It was only later while working as an IT project manager that I started to see the potential.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would take in my home cooked food to heat at work for lunch and the same thing happened again with colleagues commenting on the smell and look of the food and asking to try some.<\/p>\n
\u201cSoon I was having to cook up larger batches so everyone could try some and as I developed the idea for Spicentice I would test out some of the recipes on my colleagues.\u201d<\/p>\n
Spicentice was launched in 2006, visiting farmers\u2019 markets and food shows and things got serious when M&S placed an order for 80,000 units in 2008.<\/p>\n
Orders from other supermarkets followed including Asda and Sainsburys but Ketan wanted to build his own brand with Spicentice rather than sell his products under supermarket labels.<\/p>\n
When Mita quit her job as a primary school teacher, Ketan invested in new premises and a new e-commerce website and began to focus on online trading.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Inspired by his mums cooking a Leicester man quit his IT career and launched an online multi-million-pound business empire in meal kits. Ketan Varu used to have spicy curry kits sent to him by his mum when he was at Sheffield Hallam University 15 years ago which inspired him to launch his business Spicentice. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29700,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,3,112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","category-news","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29699\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}