HYDERABAD: One ingredient that is omnipresent in every kitchen is onions. And fried onions are the sine qua non of Hyderabadi cooking. The process of chopping onions, however, is painstaking and is always followed by shedding of tears.
To make everyday cooking a wee bit easier, Everyday Gourmet Kitchen (EGK), a Mumbai based enterprise founded by Satyajit Roy offers a variety of onion products. This food processing firm has a wide range of onion products for domestic and industrial use, like crispy fried onion, wet fried onion and fresh fried onion. These products can be ordered online and arrive in polythene sachets. The price range is Rs 250-300 per kilogram.
This innovative idea was not an immediate hit in the market says Satyajit, “Initially there was a reluctance from the market to accept the product as the response that we got from commercial kitchens was that they peel cut and fry their own onions as they have been doing for many years.
Once we got some of the bigger kitchens to try our product, they realised the multi-pronged benefits of EGK Fresh Fried Onions. Reduction in time, labour and resources at a competitive rate allowed many kitchens to make their operations more efficient.”
The organisation says they offer onion products that maintain the taste of your food, have minimum preservatives and reduce laborious tasks involved in cooking which require no skill. This type of food processing when done right is also a way to reduce yield wastage on a very large scale.
The company has also roped in onion farmers to join their initiative: “Since the people most affected by the volatility of the onion market are the farmers, we decided to tie up directly with them to provide a stable and fair buyback arrangement for their produce.
This allows them not worry to about selling their produce and concentrate on their core competency which is increasing the quality and yield from their farms,” says Satyajit. He was inspired to launch such an initiative as there is an abundance of onion produce every year and he intended to make a dent in the
wastage figure which stands at approximately 5 million metric tonnes yearly.