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http://SceneLoc8.com, a comprehensive location listing website, is now empowering creators in Mumbai, Thane, Navi Mumbai, and Palghar to discover hundreds of unique and inspiring locations for their creative projects. SceneLoc8.com provides a user-friendly platform for photographers, filmmakers, vloggers, and other content creators to browse and explore a diverse range of venues, from luxurious estates to industrial spaces, all free to browse. Whether you’re searching for the perfect urban backdrop for your next film shoot, a captivating natural landscape for a pre-wedding photoshoot, or a trendy cafe for your vlog, SceneLoc8.com has something for everyone. “We are thrilled to bring SceneLoc8 to Mumbai and nearby locations,” says Mr. Mayur Merai, founder of SceneLoc8.com. “Our mission is to empower creators by providing them with a one-stop shop to discover the perfect location to bring their vision to life. With a mix of free and paid listings, creators have the flexibility to find what suits their budget.” SceneLoc8 offers a valuable resource for creators, including: Extensive Location Listings: SceneLoc8.com features hundreds of unique locations across various categories, including outdoor parks and beaches, indoor studios and event venues, and everything in between. Free and Paid Options: The platform caters to all budgets, with a mix of free and paid location listings. Building a Creator Community: SceneLoc8.com is actively building a community on WhatsApp to share hidden gem locations and foster collaboration among creators. Didn’t find what you’re looking for on the website? SceneLoc8.com’s WhatsApp community might have the perfect hidden gem location for your next project! About SceneLoc8.com SceneLoc8.com is a comprehensive listing website designed to empower creators by connecting them with diverse and inspiring locations for their creative projects. SceneLoc8 currently serves Mumbai, Thane, Navi Mumbai, and Palghar, with future expansion planned for Pune, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Lucknow, Kolkata, and Delhi. The platform offers a mix of free and paid listings to cater to all budgets and project needs. Media Contact: Mayur Merai www.sceneloc8.com info@sceneloc8.com

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[easyfoodnetwork]

Immigrant-Led Food Startups Face an Uphill Battle in the Pandemic

Anu Bhalla demos Meal Mantra at a Rhode Island grocery store | Meal Mantra/Facebook

New business are most vulnerable to disruptions caused by COVID-19

This story was originally published on Civil Eats.

This spring, as Tarun Bhalla was testing out eight-ounce curry packets for a new line of meal kits, he found that they had a tendency to burst open in a shipping test. He’s been looking for a company that can manufacture stronger packets ever since, but he still hasn’t found one. And meetings are hard to arrange during a global pandemic.

Bhalla and his wife Anu launched Meal Mantra brand curries in 2016, and they had just begun ramping up production when the coronavirus hit. They turned to the idea of selling meal kits after their biggest client closed, grant applications were denied, federal aid was out of reach, and bank loans were looking impossible. Bhalla has no backup plan and no clear path forward.

“That’s all we think about,” says Bhalla. “We have to see this year out. It’s survival, that’s it.”

The Bhallas and countless food entrepreneurs like them are essential contributors to a diverse economic landscape. They enrich cultural exchange through culinary diplomacy. They’re immigrants, they’re working parents, and they’re lifting themselves out of poorly paid wage work. And yet when it comes to staying in business during the pandemic, many have been left to their own devices.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Meal Mantra (@mantrameal) on Jan 25, 2019 at 4:47pm PST

Earlier this year, the Bhallas struck a deal to sell their pre-made curries to Boston College, which wanted to add them to five cafeteria menus after a successful pilot. But when the campus closed down in the second week of March, Meal Mantra lost 20 percent of its revenue overnight, and left the Bhallas with a glut of product.

The future of the company was suddenly in jeopardy. Self-professed marathon-running health nuts, the Bhallas had long been disappointed with the highly processed curries cluttering supermarket shelves. Anu, granddaughter of tandoori innovator Kundan Lal Gujral, adapted her recipes to incorporate fresh, New England-grown ingredients, and their lemongrass and galangal-infused Goan Curry won a Sofi Award in 2019, the same year their revenues hit $60,000.

Meal Mantra was founded with money from a pharmaceutical business the Bhallas sold before immigrating from Delhi four years ago. Their daughter is heading to dental school and their son is a college sophomore. Tarun just turned 50 and the company was supposed to see him through to retirement.

“We were just plowing that money back into our business hoping this would grow,” he says. “And it was growing.”

In India, Tarun could pick up the phone and connect directly with buyers at colleges, grocery chains, and banquet halls. In America, finding new clients meant trade shows.

“Food shows are the only way we can really get our product in front of our customers and get new accounts,” he says. “We signed up for six shows this year, but sadly none of them are taking place.”

Retail hadn’t been a focus, but Meal Mantra curries had been available in a few local grocery stores. After the pandemic began, they shifted production from gallon bags to jars, and set their website up for online sales. Familiar customers placed orders, but it wasn’t nearly enough to make up for losing Boston College.

Adapting to a new reality

Companies like Meal Mantra are among the most vulnerable to disruptions caused by the coronavirus, according to Leticia Landa, deputy director of the food incubator La Cocina in San Francisco.

“Anybody who doesn’t have a lot of savings isn’t going to be able to invest in the business in the way that it’s going to need to [adapt],” she says. “Businesses that are just getting started, or families that are in business together and there’s not any outside source of financial stability, that’s also challenging.”

For the past 15 years, La Cocina has helped low-income women and immigrants create financially sustainable culinary food businesses. Today, they’re just helping their members survive. A standard incubator cohort is 34 businesses, but that number has almost doubled since a number of recent graduates are still working with the organization.

Many of their restaurants and caterers have closed temporarily, but packaged food producers are struggling as well. People are cooking at home more than ever, but getting packaged products onto grocery store shelves is expensive and the margins are thin.

“There’s very few small regional, local food producers making packaged foods who rely entirely on grocery [sales],” says Landa. “That’s one of the things they’re doing, and then they’re also selling at farmers’ markets or doing catering.”

Supermarket shelves may be expensive and competitive real estate, but Lilian Ryland aimed to make in-store retail her coronavirus salvation.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Chef Lilian (@naijabukaseattle) on Apr 19, 2019 at 11:04am PDT

The year had started off great for Ryland, the sole proprietor of Kent, Washington-based Naija Buka, which is named for the tiny pop-up roadside restaurants in her home country. “In Nigeria the best meals you’ll ever eat are from bukas,” says Ryland.

Reliable weekly catering gigs brought in good money without too much stress (she refuses to work weddings), and without too much time away from her children. But when Seattle’s office buildings closed down, there were no corporate workshops or off-site meetings to cater.

Office closures also cut into Ryland’s other main gig — preparing freezer-ready meals for busy professionals in her Nigerian expat community. Sales of those meals dropped 68 percent by April.

“There was so much uncertainty; a lot of people didn’t want to spend that money to buy food,” Ryland says. “And they were at home, so they could cook.”

Fortunately, Ryland had also begun producing shelf-stable sauces — first jollof, and then Everything Sauce — through Seattle’s Food Innovation Network and started pushing them alongside meal kits through social media and her website. But she knew she needed more outlets.

In December, Ryland had pitched Naija Buka to PCC Community Markets, a Seattle-based co-op. They agreed to carry a couple sauces on condition that she eliminate vegetable oil and cornstarch. Ryland reworked the recipes, but finding a distributor wasn’t easy.

“In Nigeria you can just jump out of your house, sell food, and people just come and buy it,” she says.

Seven years ago, before joining her then-fiancé in America, Ryland was a journalist and digital editor in Abuja. She worked at Nordstrom after immigrating until she was eight months pregnant with her first child. She impressed other expats with her Afang soup and jollof, built a reputation at farmers’ markets, then switched to catering corporate events after having her second child.

So it was frustrating when her applications and emails to regional food distributors were ignored, and infuriating when she did hear back.

“They said, ‘We’re not sure, it’s not something that’s familiar to us’,” she says. “Which is offensive to me. They have a wall full of pasta sauces and here I am with the first ever authentic Nigerian jollof sauce — and you have a huge African community here.”

It took five months before the Puget Sound Food Hub, a member-owned cooperative, agreed to distribute her sauces in May. Then, in mid-June, PCC started selling them at their newest location.

It was exciting, and a big financial relief. Then, less than a month later, Naija Buka was available at all 14 PCC locations after loyal customers waged an informal campaign demanding greater availability. But not all Rylan’s peers have been so lucky.

Fresh food vendors face another set of challenges

Shelf-stable products like Meal Mantra curries and Naija Buka sauces can outlast temporary fluctuations in demand. They can be centrally produced and distributed easily. But fresh food vendors also have to be immediately responsive to market changes or their inventory spoils.

“For food producers who are used to selling through farmers’ markets, catering, or doing groceries for the grab-and-go section, it’s pretty cost-prohibitive to ship cold unless people are buying a big quantity,” says Landa.

Take Oyna Natural Foods. The three-year-old company makes kuku sabzi and other Persian frittatas, and it had just expanded its retail footprint from six to 20 stores early this year. Then, the company’s owners pulled out of the new locations when coronavirus restrictions brought in-store demonstrations to an end.

“Education is definitely a huge part of our business,” says Oyna co-founder Mehdi Parnia.

Parnia and his wife, Aisan Hoss, built up their culinary reputation face-to-face at farmers’ markets, where they could offer samples, introduce themselves and a little bit of their culture to connect with potential customers. But when it’s sitting alone on a grocery shelf, Parnia found that it is harder to introduce kuku to new markets.

Oyna Natural Foods was expected to triple its business this year, according to Parnia. The one-time construction engineer took up food entrepreneurship after immigrating from Tehran to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2013 so Hoss could pursue a career as a choreographer. The couple started 2020 off focused on expansion, attending specialty foods trade shows, meeting store buyers, and finalizing new branding.

Instead, when cities shut down, business contracted sharply. Sales at the six stores where Oyna Natural Foods was already established became inconsistent. One week, Parnia would restock his entire inventory, the next week nothing sold. Other small vendors disappeared from the shelves entirely.

“The grab-and-go, ready-to-eat meals section has been significantly hit,” says Parnia. “Most of the shoppers were workers wanting to get lunch.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by OynaNaturalfoods (@oynanaturalfoods) on Jun 3, 2019 at 10:19pm PDT

Parnia and Hoss rushed to create a web store, photographing kuku and assorted sauces themselves. They now make deliveries once a week throughout the Bay Area. Still, they’re selling about 400 a week as opposed to an average of 2,000 a week last year.

They’ve experimented with shipping discounts and deals, and they’re courting new customers through social media, but Parnia finds that his inability to grasp the nuances of American pop-culture render Instagram a foreign language. Social media is “worse than going through the immigration process itself,” he adds.

Money is tight. Parnia admits that if La Cocina hadn’t suspended rent they would have stopped production entirely, and even without that overhead the business is in survival mode. But the pressure to keep going is more than financial.

“This is like a baby,” says Parnia. “We have been putting a lot of sweat and tears to make this business what it is today. If this goes away, it’s going to be a really, really painful and hard situation for me to figure out what to do.”

Get to where the sales are

Landa’s pandemic advice to La Cocina members is: “Cut your expenses as much as humanly possible; try to figure out where the sales are.”

One such member, Hayward, California-based Alicia’s Tamales Los Mayas, is selling tamales to Bay Area school districts for their lunch programs as an option to be eaten at home during the pandemic. Meal Mantra was able to sell some leftover curry from their Boston College production at cost to a food relief program run by the city of Boston.

La Cocina has been reaching out to food critics for reviews, and to national retailers like Williams + Sonoma, which carry assortments of specialty foods and packaged meals. They also sell La Cocina Food Boxes packed with nine items from a rotating cast of members. Oyna Natural Foods has been featured.

So has Teranga, the baobab-based juice and energy-bar company from Nafy Flatley. In early 2020, Flatley had her products in almost 40 Bay Area retailers and did frequent in-store demonstrations.

Flatley also catered events and she saw the crisis impact her business early on. By late March, roughly half of the stores and cafes selling Teranga products closed or started buying less.

“It’s been very hard to see those stores close and [know they] might never come back again,” she says.

Farmers’ markets became a stressful and profitless endeavor. Flatley directed customers to her online store and closed her four stands. By mid-March, she was stuck at home with three kids who no longer had schools to go to, trying to devise ways to salvage her business. By the end of the month, she was selling ready-to-heat meals through her website: Maafè one week, Nambè another, Yassa for Independence Day week.

“It’s not making up for what we were making before, but at least it’s keeping us on the market,” she says. “It’s keeping us producing. It’s keeping in people’s minds that we’re not closed.”

The private meals are more work. It takes longer to package individual portions than to prepare catering trays, and only four businesses at a time are allowed in the La Cocina kitchen, which is half the businesses typically allowed to operate there at a time. There are additional costs as well. Flatley pays extra for eco-friendly containers. She has a reserve of imported baobab and hibiscus, but ginger has doubled in price.

“It’s very difficult for me to increase my prices because I don’t believe in selling expensive food,” she says. “Everybody should have good, healthy food and it shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg.”

The extra labor is offset by Flatley’s husband, who delivers meals, restocks store shelves, and buys supplies. But he can only help because he is no longer working. The family depends on Teranga now as its sole source of income.

“I would like to move forward with all of the goals and plans and ambitions I’ve had since the beginning,” says Flatley. “That’s one of the reasons I immigrated to the United States. I think the American dream is still possible for me and my family.”

Flatley, who is from Senegal, worked in marketing before leaving to care for her firstborn son, born premature, and her mother, who was diagnosed with dementia around the same time. Selling the juices and energy bars her family made and sold back home when she was a child through word of mouth led to a new career path that she could balance with family.

But, as of early July, she says, revenue had been slashed in half. And while Teranga isn’t operating at a loss, it can’t provide a cushion for emergencies or next steps either.

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A post shared by Teranga (@terangalife) on Nov 2, 2019 at 1:15pm PDT

Federal bailout fails small businesses

All the entrepreneurs who spoke with Civil Eats for this article are wary of taking on debt, and some distrust banks outright.

“I’ve been denied loans because of who I am and what I look like,” says Flatley. “I have good credit. I can show them proof of how the business is sustainable and is growing every year, but they don’t care about that.”

However, given the dire circumstances, even wary business owners have looked into federal relief programs this spring. PPP loans were met with widespread confusion over who qualified and how to apply. When eligibility opened to owners, gig workers, and the self-employed, the confusion worsened. Banks were inundated with applications, and those without an existing business relationship with the bank were all but guaranteed to be lost in the chaos.

“It’s the big players that have relationships with their banks,” says Meal Mantra’s Bhalla, who doesn’t even have a U.S. credit score.

La Cocina was able to secure a PPP loan and keep its full staff, who researched relief programs across the governmental strata. The organization partnered with other San Francisco community agencies, and tried to find the best options for each of their members. Not everyone qualified for assistance, but Landa says that everyone who did apply got it. La Cocina also successfully raised over $500,000 to create an in-house emergency relief fund.

But most small food producers don’t have La Cocina in their corner.

“It was super confusing the whole time. And they kept changing the rules,” says Landa, noting that she’s a native English speaker born and raised in the U.S., college educated, and familiar with institutions. Anyone newly immigrated, speaking in their second language, or unaccustomed to traditional banking institutions would have found the PPP process impenetrable, she said.

None of the entrepreneurs we spoke to received first-round federal relief. Several applied for grants, and some received them. Since she spoke with Civil Eats, Flatley applied for a loan through the Small Business Administration. “I was granted a loan, which is far from enough but I will use that for now until other opportunities come up,” she says.

Seeking a path forward

As the pandemic rages on, there’s no clear future for most of these small food businesses.

In Portland, Oregon, Wambui Machua opened Spice of Africa in mid-February with the intention of serving lamb burgers, curries, and Kenyan tacos in a new food hall — but when that closed down in the spring, she had to sit tight until customers returned in mid-June. But sitting tight didn’t come easy to an ambitious entrepreneur who has been building her business for over a decade, including catering, farmers’ market sales, and classes.

After graduating with a degree in business management, she pitched a cooking class to Portland Community College with a home-made brochure. “I started my business to share and educate people about my culture,” says Machua, who hails from the Kikuyu tribe in Central Kenya.

Last year, Spice of Africa brought in approximately $100,000, its most successful year. Machua would book three, four, sometimes more gigs in a day, delegating tasks to eight or 10 contract workers as needed. After the coronavirus hit, she worked alone staffing one farmers’ market stall on weekends.

There was never any question of shutting down and finding work elsewhere. “My mother says that I’m not employable, because I have been my own person for way too long,” she says.

Things could have been worse. Even with a teenage daughter, Machua has low expenses and a stable home. The landlord of her restaurant suspended rent, and the angel investor who backed the kitchen build-out did the same. Regular customers called in bulk orders of samosas to pick up at the farmers’ market. Then, in late June, she accepted an offer to teach an online cooking class. Going virtual would be an adjustment—there would be less dancing, no ability to sample other people’s dishes. But the first virtual class went so well Machua began setting up her own.

After three months, restrictions on indoor dining were relaxed in Portland, but Machua wasn’t sure whether customers would feel safe enough to return. She hoped so — she would have to start paying rent again — and had been passing out discount cards at the farmers’ market. But with coronavirus infections climbing, she also didn’t want a crush of customers at the counter. It was time to look into delivery apps and hire a business manager.

Everyone Civil Eats spoke to is slowly plotting a path forward. Nafy Flatley worries about the increase of infections in California but remains optimistic about opening a bricks-and-mortar location for Teranga at the Municipal Marketplace, a public-private venture in San Francisco that will offer kitchen and retail space to several La Cocina incubator graduates. Construction has been delayed, but she still holds out hope that it will open.

“I have a deep belief that we’ll recover and bounce back and life will be normal again,” Flatley says. “We don’t know when that’s going to be but slowly, step-by-step, we have to walk towards our goals.”

Mehdi Parnia wants to make kuku sabzi a regional sensation, then expand the brand nationally. Positive feedback from trade shows, and the interest from retail outlets, gives him reason to believe such growth is possible. For now, Parnia has been in talks with Tastermonial, an online market and food box company catering to people with specific dietary needs.

Although Lilian Ryland is doubtful her catering business will rebound, she’s still invested in the Seattle-area food scene. She wants to see local farmers grow crops that African chefs can use instead of dried imports. One earlier attempt at cultivating the scotch bonnet peppers that give her sauces a kick failed, but she believes the Nigerian community alone could drive market demand.

Tarun and Anu Bhalla are taking the longview, as they work to find stronger sauce packets for Meal Mantra. As worried as Tarun admits to being, he also believes they have a proven product that will become more popular over time. In the meanwhile, they’ve introduced a few chutneys that they’ve been selling online and at the farmers’ market.

As La Cocina’s Landa sees it, the greater community shares some responsibility in supporting small business owners who add diversity to the culinary marketplace, and — through their sauces, dishes, and immersive cooking classes — to the variety and complexity at the heart of American culture.

“I’m hoping that there’ll be continued interest in supporting these businesses,” she says. “Pay attention to focusing on smaller, local brands when you do your grocery shopping.”

• Immigrant-Led Food Startups Face an Uphill Battle During a Pandemic [Civil Eats]

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3bMdmu5 https://ift.tt/2GOBill

Anu Bhalla demos Meal Mantra at a Rhode Island grocery store | Meal Mantra/Facebook

New business are most vulnerable to disruptions caused by COVID-19

This story was originally published on Civil Eats.

This spring, as Tarun Bhalla was testing out eight-ounce curry packets for a new line of meal kits, he found that they had a tendency to burst open in a shipping test. He’s been looking for a company that can manufacture stronger packets ever since, but he still hasn’t found one. And meetings are hard to arrange during a global pandemic.

Bhalla and his wife Anu launched Meal Mantra brand curries in 2016, and they had just begun ramping up production when the coronavirus hit. They turned to the idea of selling meal kits after their biggest client closed, grant applications were denied, federal aid was out of reach, and bank loans were looking impossible. Bhalla has no backup plan and no clear path forward.

“That’s all we think about,” says Bhalla. “We have to see this year out. It’s survival, that’s it.”

The Bhallas and countless food entrepreneurs like them are essential contributors to a diverse economic landscape. They enrich cultural exchange through culinary diplomacy. They’re immigrants, they’re working parents, and they’re lifting themselves out of poorly paid wage work. And yet when it comes to staying in business during the pandemic, many have been left to their own devices.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Meal Mantra (@mantrameal) on Jan 25, 2019 at 4:47pm PST

Earlier this year, the Bhallas struck a deal to sell their pre-made curries to Boston College, which wanted to add them to five cafeteria menus after a successful pilot. But when the campus closed down in the second week of March, Meal Mantra lost 20 percent of its revenue overnight, and left the Bhallas with a glut of product.

The future of the company was suddenly in jeopardy. Self-professed marathon-running health nuts, the Bhallas had long been disappointed with the highly processed curries cluttering supermarket shelves. Anu, granddaughter of tandoori innovator Kundan Lal Gujral, adapted her recipes to incorporate fresh, New England-grown ingredients, and their lemongrass and galangal-infused Goan Curry won a Sofi Award in 2019, the same year their revenues hit $60,000.

Meal Mantra was founded with money from a pharmaceutical business the Bhallas sold before immigrating from Delhi four years ago. Their daughter is heading to dental school and their son is a college sophomore. Tarun just turned 50 and the company was supposed to see him through to retirement.

“We were just plowing that money back into our business hoping this would grow,” he says. “And it was growing.”

In India, Tarun could pick up the phone and connect directly with buyers at colleges, grocery chains, and banquet halls. In America, finding new clients meant trade shows.

“Food shows are the only way we can really get our product in front of our customers and get new accounts,” he says. “We signed up for six shows this year, but sadly none of them are taking place.”

Retail hadn’t been a focus, but Meal Mantra curries had been available in a few local grocery stores. After the pandemic began, they shifted production from gallon bags to jars, and set their website up for online sales. Familiar customers placed orders, but it wasn’t nearly enough to make up for losing Boston College.

Adapting to a new reality

Companies like Meal Mantra are among the most vulnerable to disruptions caused by the coronavirus, according to Leticia Landa, deputy director of the food incubator La Cocina in San Francisco.

“Anybody who doesn’t have a lot of savings isn’t going to be able to invest in the business in the way that it’s going to need to [adapt],” she says. “Businesses that are just getting started, or families that are in business together and there’s not any outside source of financial stability, that’s also challenging.”

For the past 15 years, La Cocina has helped low-income women and immigrants create financially sustainable culinary food businesses. Today, they’re just helping their members survive. A standard incubator cohort is 34 businesses, but that number has almost doubled since a number of recent graduates are still working with the organization.

Many of their restaurants and caterers have closed temporarily, but packaged food producers are struggling as well. People are cooking at home more than ever, but getting packaged products onto grocery store shelves is expensive and the margins are thin.

“There’s very few small regional, local food producers making packaged foods who rely entirely on grocery [sales],” says Landa. “That’s one of the things they’re doing, and then they’re also selling at farmers’ markets or doing catering.”

Supermarket shelves may be expensive and competitive real estate, but Lilian Ryland aimed to make in-store retail her coronavirus salvation.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Chef Lilian (@naijabukaseattle) on Apr 19, 2019 at 11:04am PDT

The year had started off great for Ryland, the sole proprietor of Kent, Washington-based Naija Buka, which is named for the tiny pop-up roadside restaurants in her home country. “In Nigeria the best meals you’ll ever eat are from bukas,” says Ryland.

Reliable weekly catering gigs brought in good money without too much stress (she refuses to work weddings), and without too much time away from her children. But when Seattle’s office buildings closed down, there were no corporate workshops or off-site meetings to cater.

Office closures also cut into Ryland’s other main gig — preparing freezer-ready meals for busy professionals in her Nigerian expat community. Sales of those meals dropped 68 percent by April.

“There was so much uncertainty; a lot of people didn’t want to spend that money to buy food,” Ryland says. “And they were at home, so they could cook.”

Fortunately, Ryland had also begun producing shelf-stable sauces — first jollof, and then Everything Sauce — through Seattle’s Food Innovation Network and started pushing them alongside meal kits through social media and her website. But she knew she needed more outlets.

In December, Ryland had pitched Naija Buka to PCC Community Markets, a Seattle-based co-op. They agreed to carry a couple sauces on condition that she eliminate vegetable oil and cornstarch. Ryland reworked the recipes, but finding a distributor wasn’t easy.

“In Nigeria you can just jump out of your house, sell food, and people just come and buy it,” she says.

Seven years ago, before joining her then-fiancé in America, Ryland was a journalist and digital editor in Abuja. She worked at Nordstrom after immigrating until she was eight months pregnant with her first child. She impressed other expats with her Afang soup and jollof, built a reputation at farmers’ markets, then switched to catering corporate events after having her second child.

So it was frustrating when her applications and emails to regional food distributors were ignored, and infuriating when she did hear back.

“They said, ‘We’re not sure, it’s not something that’s familiar to us’,” she says. “Which is offensive to me. They have a wall full of pasta sauces and here I am with the first ever authentic Nigerian jollof sauce — and you have a huge African community here.”

It took five months before the Puget Sound Food Hub, a member-owned cooperative, agreed to distribute her sauces in May. Then, in mid-June, PCC started selling them at their newest location.

It was exciting, and a big financial relief. Then, less than a month later, Naija Buka was available at all 14 PCC locations after loyal customers waged an informal campaign demanding greater availability. But not all Rylan’s peers have been so lucky.

Fresh food vendors face another set of challenges

Shelf-stable products like Meal Mantra curries and Naija Buka sauces can outlast temporary fluctuations in demand. They can be centrally produced and distributed easily. But fresh food vendors also have to be immediately responsive to market changes or their inventory spoils.

“For food producers who are used to selling through farmers’ markets, catering, or doing groceries for the grab-and-go section, it’s pretty cost-prohibitive to ship cold unless people are buying a big quantity,” says Landa.

Take Oyna Natural Foods. The three-year-old company makes kuku sabzi and other Persian frittatas, and it had just expanded its retail footprint from six to 20 stores early this year. Then, the company’s owners pulled out of the new locations when coronavirus restrictions brought in-store demonstrations to an end.

“Education is definitely a huge part of our business,” says Oyna co-founder Mehdi Parnia.

Parnia and his wife, Aisan Hoss, built up their culinary reputation face-to-face at farmers’ markets, where they could offer samples, introduce themselves and a little bit of their culture to connect with potential customers. But when it’s sitting alone on a grocery shelf, Parnia found that it is harder to introduce kuku to new markets.

Oyna Natural Foods was expected to triple its business this year, according to Parnia. The one-time construction engineer took up food entrepreneurship after immigrating from Tehran to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2013 so Hoss could pursue a career as a choreographer. The couple started 2020 off focused on expansion, attending specialty foods trade shows, meeting store buyers, and finalizing new branding.

Instead, when cities shut down, business contracted sharply. Sales at the six stores where Oyna Natural Foods was already established became inconsistent. One week, Parnia would restock his entire inventory, the next week nothing sold. Other small vendors disappeared from the shelves entirely.

“The grab-and-go, ready-to-eat meals section has been significantly hit,” says Parnia. “Most of the shoppers were workers wanting to get lunch.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by OynaNaturalfoods (@oynanaturalfoods) on Jun 3, 2019 at 10:19pm PDT

Parnia and Hoss rushed to create a web store, photographing kuku and assorted sauces themselves. They now make deliveries once a week throughout the Bay Area. Still, they’re selling about 400 a week as opposed to an average of 2,000 a week last year.

They’ve experimented with shipping discounts and deals, and they’re courting new customers through social media, but Parnia finds that his inability to grasp the nuances of American pop-culture render Instagram a foreign language. Social media is “worse than going through the immigration process itself,” he adds.

Money is tight. Parnia admits that if La Cocina hadn’t suspended rent they would have stopped production entirely, and even without that overhead the business is in survival mode. But the pressure to keep going is more than financial.

“This is like a baby,” says Parnia. “We have been putting a lot of sweat and tears to make this business what it is today. If this goes away, it’s going to be a really, really painful and hard situation for me to figure out what to do.”

Get to where the sales are

Landa’s pandemic advice to La Cocina members is: “Cut your expenses as much as humanly possible; try to figure out where the sales are.”

One such member, Hayward, California-based Alicia’s Tamales Los Mayas, is selling tamales to Bay Area school districts for their lunch programs as an option to be eaten at home during the pandemic. Meal Mantra was able to sell some leftover curry from their Boston College production at cost to a food relief program run by the city of Boston.

La Cocina has been reaching out to food critics for reviews, and to national retailers like Williams + Sonoma, which carry assortments of specialty foods and packaged meals. They also sell La Cocina Food Boxes packed with nine items from a rotating cast of members. Oyna Natural Foods has been featured.

So has Teranga, the baobab-based juice and energy-bar company from Nafy Flatley. In early 2020, Flatley had her products in almost 40 Bay Area retailers and did frequent in-store demonstrations.

Flatley also catered events and she saw the crisis impact her business early on. By late March, roughly half of the stores and cafes selling Teranga products closed or started buying less.

“It’s been very hard to see those stores close and [know they] might never come back again,” she says.

Farmers’ markets became a stressful and profitless endeavor. Flatley directed customers to her online store and closed her four stands. By mid-March, she was stuck at home with three kids who no longer had schools to go to, trying to devise ways to salvage her business. By the end of the month, she was selling ready-to-heat meals through her website: Maafè one week, Nambè another, Yassa for Independence Day week.

“It’s not making up for what we were making before, but at least it’s keeping us on the market,” she says. “It’s keeping us producing. It’s keeping in people’s minds that we’re not closed.”

The private meals are more work. It takes longer to package individual portions than to prepare catering trays, and only four businesses at a time are allowed in the La Cocina kitchen, which is half the businesses typically allowed to operate there at a time. There are additional costs as well. Flatley pays extra for eco-friendly containers. She has a reserve of imported baobab and hibiscus, but ginger has doubled in price.

“It’s very difficult for me to increase my prices because I don’t believe in selling expensive food,” she says. “Everybody should have good, healthy food and it shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg.”

The extra labor is offset by Flatley’s husband, who delivers meals, restocks store shelves, and buys supplies. But he can only help because he is no longer working. The family depends on Teranga now as its sole source of income.

“I would like to move forward with all of the goals and plans and ambitions I’ve had since the beginning,” says Flatley. “That’s one of the reasons I immigrated to the United States. I think the American dream is still possible for me and my family.”

Flatley, who is from Senegal, worked in marketing before leaving to care for her firstborn son, born premature, and her mother, who was diagnosed with dementia around the same time. Selling the juices and energy bars her family made and sold back home when she was a child through word of mouth led to a new career path that she could balance with family.

But, as of early July, she says, revenue had been slashed in half. And while Teranga isn’t operating at a loss, it can’t provide a cushion for emergencies or next steps either.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Teranga (@terangalife) on Nov 2, 2019 at 1:15pm PDT

Federal bailout fails small businesses

All the entrepreneurs who spoke with Civil Eats for this article are wary of taking on debt, and some distrust banks outright.

“I’ve been denied loans because of who I am and what I look like,” says Flatley. “I have good credit. I can show them proof of how the business is sustainable and is growing every year, but they don’t care about that.”

However, given the dire circumstances, even wary business owners have looked into federal relief programs this spring. PPP loans were met with widespread confusion over who qualified and how to apply. When eligibility opened to owners, gig workers, and the self-employed, the confusion worsened. Banks were inundated with applications, and those without an existing business relationship with the bank were all but guaranteed to be lost in the chaos.

“It’s the big players that have relationships with their banks,” says Meal Mantra’s Bhalla, who doesn’t even have a U.S. credit score.

La Cocina was able to secure a PPP loan and keep its full staff, who researched relief programs across the governmental strata. The organization partnered with other San Francisco community agencies, and tried to find the best options for each of their members. Not everyone qualified for assistance, but Landa says that everyone who did apply got it. La Cocina also successfully raised over $500,000 to create an in-house emergency relief fund.

But most small food producers don’t have La Cocina in their corner.

“It was super confusing the whole time. And they kept changing the rules,” says Landa, noting that she’s a native English speaker born and raised in the U.S., college educated, and familiar with institutions. Anyone newly immigrated, speaking in their second language, or unaccustomed to traditional banking institutions would have found the PPP process impenetrable, she said.

None of the entrepreneurs we spoke to received first-round federal relief. Several applied for grants, and some received them. Since she spoke with Civil Eats, Flatley applied for a loan through the Small Business Administration. “I was granted a loan, which is far from enough but I will use that for now until other opportunities come up,” she says.

Seeking a path forward

As the pandemic rages on, there’s no clear future for most of these small food businesses.

In Portland, Oregon, Wambui Machua opened Spice of Africa in mid-February with the intention of serving lamb burgers, curries, and Kenyan tacos in a new food hall — but when that closed down in the spring, she had to sit tight until customers returned in mid-June. But sitting tight didn’t come easy to an ambitious entrepreneur who has been building her business for over a decade, including catering, farmers’ market sales, and classes.

After graduating with a degree in business management, she pitched a cooking class to Portland Community College with a home-made brochure. “I started my business to share and educate people about my culture,” says Machua, who hails from the Kikuyu tribe in Central Kenya.

Last year, Spice of Africa brought in approximately $100,000, its most successful year. Machua would book three, four, sometimes more gigs in a day, delegating tasks to eight or 10 contract workers as needed. After the coronavirus hit, she worked alone staffing one farmers’ market stall on weekends.

There was never any question of shutting down and finding work elsewhere. “My mother says that I’m not employable, because I have been my own person for way too long,” she says.

Things could have been worse. Even with a teenage daughter, Machua has low expenses and a stable home. The landlord of her restaurant suspended rent, and the angel investor who backed the kitchen build-out did the same. Regular customers called in bulk orders of samosas to pick up at the farmers’ market. Then, in late June, she accepted an offer to teach an online cooking class. Going virtual would be an adjustment—there would be less dancing, no ability to sample other people’s dishes. But the first virtual class went so well Machua began setting up her own.

After three months, restrictions on indoor dining were relaxed in Portland, but Machua wasn’t sure whether customers would feel safe enough to return. She hoped so — she would have to start paying rent again — and had been passing out discount cards at the farmers’ market. But with coronavirus infections climbing, she also didn’t want a crush of customers at the counter. It was time to look into delivery apps and hire a business manager.

Everyone Civil Eats spoke to is slowly plotting a path forward. Nafy Flatley worries about the increase of infections in California but remains optimistic about opening a bricks-and-mortar location for Teranga at the Municipal Marketplace, a public-private venture in San Francisco that will offer kitchen and retail space to several La Cocina incubator graduates. Construction has been delayed, but she still holds out hope that it will open.

“I have a deep belief that we’ll recover and bounce back and life will be normal again,” Flatley says. “We don’t know when that’s going to be but slowly, step-by-step, we have to walk towards our goals.”

Mehdi Parnia wants to make kuku sabzi a regional sensation, then expand the brand nationally. Positive feedback from trade shows, and the interest from retail outlets, gives him reason to believe such growth is possible. For now, Parnia has been in talks with Tastermonial, an online market and food box company catering to people with specific dietary needs.

Although Lilian Ryland is doubtful her catering business will rebound, she’s still invested in the Seattle-area food scene. She wants to see local farmers grow crops that African chefs can use instead of dried imports. One earlier attempt at cultivating the scotch bonnet peppers that give her sauces a kick failed, but she believes the Nigerian community alone could drive market demand.

Tarun and Anu Bhalla are taking the longview, as they work to find stronger sauce packets for Meal Mantra. As worried as Tarun admits to being, he also believes they have a proven product that will become more popular over time. In the meanwhile, they’ve introduced a few chutneys that they’ve been selling online and at the farmers’ market.

As La Cocina’s Landa sees it, the greater community shares some responsibility in supporting small business owners who add diversity to the culinary marketplace, and — through their sauces, dishes, and immersive cooking classes — to the variety and complexity at the heart of American culture.

“I’m hoping that there’ll be continued interest in supporting these businesses,” she says. “Pay attention to focusing on smaller, local brands when you do your grocery shopping.”

• Immigrant-Led Food Startups Face an Uphill Battle During a Pandemic [Civil Eats]

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3bMdmu5 via Blogger https://ift.tt/3ihQFAt

[nisadsonu291]

Prewedding Photo Shoot location in Delhi

Preweddingphotoshop.co.in provide you the best location for Pre-wedding shoot in Delhi only at 12999/- (full day) which includes many facilities like changing rooms, makeup room, washroom.

[godrejproperties75-blog]

Godrej Meridien Gurgaon – Dream Home Project in Sector 106

About the Developer –

Godrej Properties, the developer of the magnificent Godrej Meridien residential launch project in Gurugram, needs no introduction, to those value high end residential complexes which add real quality to life. Godrej Properties is known for its unique design features, giving each home a special feeling, second to none. Godrej Properties had been rated the 2nd best developer in Asia and the 5th best globally in terms of its keen focus on building sustainable environmentally friendly projects, by the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark report 2016 and is only, one of the feathers in the cap of this outstanding real estate company.

About the project –

Welcome to Godrej Meridien Gurgaon – your premium high end haven, an address you’ll be proud of forever in the NCR. Here, every attention has been paid to detail and no stone has been left unturned in ensuring your maximum comfort and satisfaction. Firstly all the essentials needed in our day to day lives is at your doorstep or even closer –be it the groceries and other daily household requirements that need to be met,  any medical emergency that needs to be addressed, or having peace of mind knowing that the ATM is just at your fingertips, you name it, Godrej Meridien offers it and much more amidst boundless green vistas.

The project is being launched with two kinds of towers – premium and iconic and the very best in international standards has been upheld in the construction quality.

Premium construction specifications of the project –

Pre casting to be used for the premium towers and aluminium is to be used for the iconic towers.

The lobbies have been designed with double heights in order to give a feeling of opulence and splendour.

Full care has been taken for the inflow of plentiful natural light and cross ventilation across all the apartments.

VRF/VRV air conditioning in the apartments

Premium quality interior fittings specifications of the project –

Premium quality Kohler bath fittings are offered along with Crema Marfil marble floorings in the living cum dining areas.

To add to comfort, each unit comes with a modular kitchen.

High security fittings specifications of the project –

4 tier security and a Godrej video door phone with each unit ensures that no stone has been left unturned in seeing to it, that the residents are in safe hands.

Here’s the kind of luxury apartments Premium Towers offers. These are mainly of the following 3 kinds – 2 BHK, 3 BHK and 3 BHK + Utility.

Iconic Towers has been designed with 3 BHK + utility and 4 BHK + utility.

The payment plan here too, is the same as that of the Premium Towers –an advanced booking price of Rupees 5 lac is to be paid initially.

Location details –

The property is being launched at Sector 106 Gurugram, just a stone’s throw away from the spectacular, 8 lane Dwarka Expressway, which seamlessly connects New Delhi to Gurugram in Haryana. This leaves you completely worry free about your daily commute to work and you get the best of both worlds – your own quiet haven at home as well as an easy access to your workplace.

Additionally this project is also close to the Delhi International airport, Cyberhub and the proposed diplomatic enclave which is come up at Dwarka itself.

Project amenities –

The amenities offered in this project shall leave you spellbound as every home owner’s dream has been meticulously taken care of.

The amenities on offer are –

An Olympic size swimming pool with a poolside bar

An indoor heated pool with a jacuzzi

A dedicated Sports Arena with – a cycling track, jogging track, skating trail, a half basketball court, an indoor badminton court, a tennis court and a squash court, to suit the tastes of varied sports lovers.

A 48 seat mini theatre

Restaurants to suit every taste bud, including fine dining restaurants and wine tasting facilities.

A multipurpose hall which can be used for family functions such as weddings and the like.

An art gallery

Spa and salon

A library for book worms

Guest rooms for visitors of residents

A stunning fountain

A fitness studio for both men and women by Ramona Braganza

State of the art gym by Holyfield Gyms

The largest clubhouse in Gurugram – Club Meridien, a 3 storey massive building spanning over 66000 sq ft !

24*7 doorman, valet and concierge desk to answer all your needs be it any time of the day or night.

More Info About Project :-

Visit Here :- Godrej Meridien

Call Now :- +91-9810047296

[kanika0028]

Get Personal Loan in Delhi NCR with Chintamani Finlease

Register and submit documents online. Interest rates starting from 26%. Quick Registration. Now, get a fast personal loan in Delhi and NCR online with Chintamani Finlease. Avail loans starting from 50,000 to 20,0000. Register and upload documents to get approval within hours. 

Personal loans in Delhi area unit simply available as loads of economic establishments and NBFCs offer them at an honest charge per unit. a personal loan is that the most suitable choice if you are doing not have AN quality to produce as collateral because it could be a sort of unsecured loan. The loan quantity ranges from Rs. 50,000 to Rs. a pair of Lakhs with a tenure amount of one year to one and a half years. Personal loans in Delhi area unit best fitted to times of contingencies because the loan is provided instantly. nominal documentation and interval are taken for the authorisation method. 

Usually, a personal loan is obtained for paying off medical bills, home renovation, wedding expenses, personal consumer goods and travel expenses. you'll be able to use a personal loan if you would like to pay off multiple unpaid loans by choosing debt consolidation or balance transfer.

In a metropolitan city such as Delhi, one’s monthly expenditure is high. Travelling expenses, hefty medical bills and high taxes tend to burn a hole in our pockets. Thus, if you have got a good credit score, lenders would give you a personal loan at low-interest rates and the other way around. it's best to hold out an in-depth analysis and gather relevant info before taking a personal loan. The interest rates, process fees, flexibility of tenure and pre-payment charges ought to be compared and therefore the most suitable choice ought to be chosen. many of us are the lure of borrowing from non-public lenders who charge a really high rate of interest. At times, the interest rates will go as high as 26%.

How to get a personal loan in Delhi & NCR

You can instantly avail personal loans in Delhi & NCR area from Chintamani Finlease for your home renovation, medical needs, wedding, travel and varied alternative personal or skilled desires. There many benefits of taking a loan from a peer to peer lending platforms like Chintamani Finlease such as cheaper processing fees, quicker approval and seamless method with a completely paperless procedure.

With Chintamani Finlease, you'll expertise the premium options like:

Quick and simple registration

Affordable EMIs

A transparent and hassle-free method

Fast Documentation with prompt Approval

No Hidden Charges

Credit assessment with none biases of nature or work, location, etc.

As the demand for personal loans is growing at a speedy pace in Delhi, banks and alternative ancient monetary establishments are not ready to serve all the candidates whereas Chintamani Finlease is offered altogether the areas in Delhi and NCR, you'll be able to simply register online using the "Apply Now" button given on top of. you do not get to visit any branch or workplace along with your documents. Sign up and upload all the required documents and you will be approved within minutes. so as to urge instant approval and an instant personal loan, you need to have a good credit history with adequate monthly income as mentioned in the eligibility criteria further below.

Certain alternative factors that are thought-about whereas sanctioning loans embody the corporate during which you're used, sort of business (in case of the only proprietor), years in commission etc. supported varied factors, the lenders can quote the sanctioned quantity, tenure of the loan and therefore the rates of interest. Chintamani Finlease provides personal loans from as low as agency 50,000 to a most of agency 20,00,000, In most of the cases, the minimum monthly regular payment of agency 20,000 is needed to urge a loan sanctioned. so as to urge your loan sanctioned with none hurdle, it's necessary to possess an honest credit score. However, Chintamani Finlease offers loans even for moderate credit score.

In order to urge a personal loan in Delhi, you need to satisfy the below-mentioned criteria

 You should be between 21 to 58 years age.

You should be a salaried individual, drawing a monthly regular payment or a self-employed business owner with a turnover of on top of 5 lacs every year.

In case you're a salaried individual, you must draw a minimum of agency 30,000 or a lot of as a monthly regular payment (this may differ based on location).

You should are be residing in your current residence for over a year.

Also, you must are into an occupation for regarding one year.

Documents needed for salaried applicants:

Photographs Yes

Identity Proof (anyone in all the following): PAN Card, Adhaar Card, Voter ID, Passport

Date of Birth Proof (anyone in all the following): PAN Card, Passport

Signature Proof (anyone in all the following): PAN Card, Signature verification from your bank, Passport

Address Proof (anyone in all the following): Passport, financial statement, Voter ID

Contact Proof (anyone in all the following)

Postpaid Mobile Bill (last month), paid subscriber line Bill (last month)

Bank Statements Last 6 months Proof of financial gain

Last year's Business/Personal ITR or financial gain Declaration

Documents required for self-employed applicants:

Photograph - 2

Identity Proof (any one of the following) - PAN Card, Adhaar Card, Voter ID, Passport

Proof of office address (any one of the following) - Maintenance bill/utility bill

Office ownership proof (any one of the following) - Electricity bills/maintenance bills/property documents

Income proof(any one of the following) - Income Tax Returns for the last two years/profit & loss account, balance sheet and auditors report

Proof of existence (any one of the following) - Company registration certificate/Tax registration certificate

Bank Statements - Latest current and savings account copy for 6 months

Salay Slip - Latest 3 month  

[businessthreesixfive-blog]

Hungry for more, this financial investment banker turned entrepreneur with catering service aggregator CaterNinja

Bengaluru-based catering service aggregator CaterNinja lets clients book problem-free catering services at the click of a mouse.

India is known for its epic events. Be it a wedding, anniversary, birthday, business celebration and even something as insignificant as a kitty celebration - we understand how to kick back and having fun with music, dance, gupshup, booze and most significantly, food.But, think of a circumstance where you invite people over for an event and the catering service you hired is a no-show. Nightmare!Anup Agarwal had

to live this problem one day when the caterer employed for his child's birthday celebration didn't show up. Not wanting this scenario upon even his worst opponent, Anup, together with Anurag Mishra, his former colleague at Kotak, chose to do something. And in June 2016, they established caterer aggregating startup, CaterNinja. Catering service aggregator CaterNinjais an ecommerce platform that brings catering services, dining establishments, luxury hotels and home chefs all in one location, enabling customers to put an order for a catering service at the click of a mouse. The company delivered their first order in January 2017. With an internal rating system for restaurants and caterers on criteria consisting of health, accountability and effectiveness in addition to necessary certification, CaterNinja has actually removed the ones that failed to impress, be it by their tardiness or absence of knowledge in dealing with food for big crowds."While we can not manage the food quality or taste, we can guarantee that the food is provided problem-free and on time,"states Anup.How does this catering service aggregator work?CaterNinja works like Zomato for caterers. On the site, there is a'vendor signup 'option, where catering services can

request for a listing. When the catering business's(or hotel, restaurant)internal ranking is done, it is listed on the website free of charge. A commission cost(of about 5 to 10 percent)or a repaired charge(from Rs 5,000 to Rs 15,000 )is charged from the supplier after the shipment of their services.Getting the vendors on board was easy because they did not need to pay to be noted. Anup Agarwal Customers, on the other hand, have to log in, put the essential filters and select from the list of lots of options offered on the site depending on their order size, budget plan, kind of meal, food, etc.

Consumers can

also schedule services through email, WhatsApp or their chat-based service. Each customer has to pay half in advance while booking the services of a specific caterer.You can sample the food prior to embracing big orders. For smaller events, you can select a paid food trial.The company uses catering in 5 different categories: catering services, dining establishments, luxury hotels, speciality restaurants and cloud kitchens and home chefs. CaterNinja lists food packs varying from Rs 50(for the treat boxes)to a five-course meal at Rs 3,000. Its business consumers include KPMG, Ernst & Young, Grant Thornton, Cowrks, CRY, True Caller, Zivame and Amazon Frontizo, among others.CaterNinja likewise has customers for social events such as wedding event suppers, pre-wedding functions, birthday parties, housewarming events and social functions.The ninjas The catering service aggregator has a core team of 4 members. 41-year-old Anurag is an ex-senior personal lender, who had earlier began a restaurant venture Whereabouts Grill & Lounge.On the other hand, 37-year-old Anup has more than a decade of experience in the financial investment banking sector and has formerly dealt with Credit Suisse and Kotak Financial Investment Bank. He likewise worked as

an associate director at PwC before plunging into full-time entrepreneurship. Team CaterNinja Their team likewise consists of 44-year old Rahul Nanda, who has more than two years of experience in the hospitality industry and financial services industry and heads the company's organisation alliances.From a bite to the entire pie Presently bootstrapped, the business intends

to cross Rs 5 crore

in earnings by the end of this year. CaterNinja was founded with a seed capital of Rs 5 lakh, contributed by the creators from their savings. The company has not raised any external funding yet, they are

looking for pre-series A funding.CaterNinja presently lists more than 200 curated caterers and they serve more than 25 corporate clients in Bengaluru itself. It has earned an earnings of more than Rs 50 lakh because creation from repeat customers in the IT, financial and marketing sectors. Anurag Mishra"Unlike food delivery services, all our transactions are successful as the order sizes are big

,"Anup describes. The business claims to have served 5,000 meals monthly in their very first quarter, that is from beginning till March 2017. They have balanced 25,000 meals a month last year and strategies on serving one lakh meals a month by March 2019.

The market in a

nutshell While business like HungerBox, Urban Clap, The Urban Kitchen Area Catering Provider are only discovery platforms for caterers, CaterNinja is an ecommerce shipment platform. They make the catering process hassle-free for the user.Bigger fish to fry CaterNinja began as a B2B business, they are now focusing more on the B2C model of organisation. It is currently functional

in Bengaluru , Delhi NCR and Mumbai. The

catering service aggregator plans to introduce in Hyderabad and Kolkata by the end of this year. By March 2019, the business intends to be operational in 10 cities, and cover the leading 25 cities by the end of 2019.

[theperfectlocation-blog]

Cherish Love Moments with Pre Wedding Shoot !

Get amazing clicks before getting hitched. A pre wedding photo shoot is a great way to know each other as you embark on a new journey together.

A picture speaks a thousand words...True indeed. A pre wedding photoshoot has become the trend of the time. It embodies a couple’s love story as they embark on a new journey. It is all about savouring the best moments of love, togetherness and anxiety that the couple feels as they look forward to their D day. The pre wedding photoshoot is a fun and frolic expression of romance in the bliss of amazing locations.

Before the shoot, the couples should make sure that they choose a perfectionist to work and play behind the camera. A good and a thorough research of the places beforehand for the shoot is an essential prerequisite too for the memories to be documented. One could go for quaint heritage places or amidst the greenery of the garden or a paid private location; it all depends on the couple style and mood. Nowadays at most public places doing a relaxed fun shoot is difficult due to prying eyes and people harassing for money.

Some of the best pre wedding shoot locations are The Perfect Location in Delhi NCR, the breath-taking Hauz Khas Village, the vast and colourful Lodhi Gardens, the vintage beauty of Humayun’s tomb, the sprawling Garden of Five Senses and the grand Qutub Minar.

You simply have to carry two or three dresses and the rest is done by the photographer. Also, have a clear discussion with your makeup artist because both the photographer and the makeup artist are the creative force who will put your masterpiece together. Have all the necessary props and elements you need like shoes, flowers and decorations. If you as a couple are a fitness freak, prepare a proper health diet and an exercise schedule. You would want to look fit and in shape on your shoot day.

Also for the brides, start getting regular facials to keep your skin radiant and picture perfect. It helps you keep calm and relaxed during your jittery moments. Most importantly, trust your photographer and the makeup artist with all your heart. This will make your shoot great and successful. A well chosen location adds to the eternal beauty of the shoot and kindles the love between the couple. Celebrate your once-in-a-lifetime event with a pre-wedding shoot.

[munishkhanna]

For your Pre wedding Shoot, It's a good idea to invest in a good location beside a good Wedding Photographer.

There are some well-designed locations in and around Delhi, which are available for a day to shoot your Pre wedding shoot. Some of the well-known ones are Studio Future Forward, The Perfect Location, Tikli Bottom, Picture Destination

However, all these paid locations are not centrally located in Delhi but on the outskirts and they charge a fee for the days shoot. The same place is given out to two or sometimes, even more couples on the same day. But you can always discuss it before hand and plan it all accordingly. These places are big enough and the Team of “Together we Rock” can well plan your pre wedding shoot around the themed spots available at these locations.

If you need more privacy and do not wish to travel, we have our own centrally located studio in Delhi and your pre wedding shoot can be planned in the comfort and privacy of our own studio as well. If you are planning some intimate shots together, our own studio can be a good option.

Streets, Parks and Monuments can work out well If the crowd does not intimidate you. These places do not cost anything but yes of course you do not have the required privacy and there is the uncertainty of how the authorities may respond. Although one can take pictures anywhere, there are no specific rules or guidelines. To avoid the wastage of time, it's always better to go for a paid location.

Our pre wedding Shoot packages do not include the fees payable to the location and the same can be coordinated directly by the couple or through us. This gives you an option of a free choice and makes it easier for you to directly understand the pros and cons of each location. Also you can check the availability directly. However you get all the required assistance from the team of Together We Rock,

Munish Khanna is a seasoned advertising and fashion photographer who is running a complete wedding Photography and Videography company heading a team of very creative professional photographers.

[hobbitonshoot-blog]

Find new location for making your shoot more refreshing. Use Hobbiton Shoot location for your fashion, maternity, kids, and birthday photo shoots.For More Detail Visit our website : http://hobbitonshoot.com/

[easyfoodnetwork]

Anu Bhalla demos Meal Mantra at a Rhode Island grocery store | Meal Mantra/Facebook New business are most vulnerable to disruptions caused by COVID-19 This story was originally published on Civil Eats. This spring, as Tarun Bhalla was testing out eight-ounce curry packets for a new line of meal kits, he found that they had a tendency to burst open in a shipping test. He’s been looking for a company that can manufacture stronger packets ever since, but he still hasn’t found one. And meetings are hard to arrange during a global pandemic. Bhalla and his wife Anu launched Meal Mantra brand curries in 2016, and they had just begun ramping up production when the coronavirus hit. They turned to the idea of selling meal kits after their biggest client closed, grant applications were denied, federal aid was out of reach, and bank loans were looking impossible. Bhalla has no backup plan and no clear path forward. “That’s all we think about,” says Bhalla. “We have to see this year out. It’s survival, that’s it.” The Bhallas and countless food entrepreneurs like them are essential contributors to a diverse economic landscape. They enrich cultural exchange through culinary diplomacy. They’re immigrants, they’re working parents, and they’re lifting themselves out of poorly paid wage work. And yet when it comes to staying in business during the pandemic, many have been left to their own devices. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Meal Mantra (@mantrameal) on Jan 25, 2019 at 4:47pm PST Earlier this year, the Bhallas struck a deal to sell their pre-made curries to Boston College, which wanted to add them to five cafeteria menus after a successful pilot. But when the campus closed down in the second week of March, Meal Mantra lost 20 percent of its revenue overnight, and left the Bhallas with a glut of product. The future of the company was suddenly in jeopardy. Self-professed marathon-running health nuts, the Bhallas had long been disappointed with the highly processed curries cluttering supermarket shelves. Anu, granddaughter of tandoori innovator Kundan Lal Gujral, adapted her recipes to incorporate fresh, New England-grown ingredients, and their lemongrass and galangal-infused Goan Curry won a Sofi Award in 2019, the same year their revenues hit $60,000. Meal Mantra was founded with money from a pharmaceutical business the Bhallas sold before immigrating from Delhi four years ago. Their daughter is heading to dental school and their son is a college sophomore. Tarun just turned 50 and the company was supposed to see him through to retirement. “We were just plowing that money back into our business hoping this would grow,” he says. “And it was growing.” In India, Tarun could pick up the phone and connect directly with buyers at colleges, grocery chains, and banquet halls. In America, finding new clients meant trade shows. “Food shows are the only way we can really get our product in front of our customers and get new accounts,” he says. “We signed up for six shows this year, but sadly none of them are taking place.” Retail hadn’t been a focus, but Meal Mantra curries had been available in a few local grocery stores. After the pandemic began, they shifted production from gallon bags to jars, and set their website up for online sales. Familiar customers placed orders, but it wasn’t nearly enough to make up for losing Boston College. Adapting to a new reality Companies like Meal Mantra are among the most vulnerable to disruptions caused by the coronavirus, according to Leticia Landa, deputy director of the food incubator La Cocina in San Francisco. “Anybody who doesn’t have a lot of savings isn’t going to be able to invest in the business in the way that it’s going to need to [adapt],” she says. “Businesses that are just getting started, or families that are in business together and there’s not any outside source of financial stability, that’s also challenging.” For the past 15 years, La Cocina has helped low-income women and immigrants create financially sustainable culinary food businesses. Today, they’re just helping their members survive. A standard incubator cohort is 34 businesses, but that number has almost doubled since a number of recent graduates are still working with the organization. Many of their restaurants and caterers have closed temporarily, but packaged food producers are struggling as well. People are cooking at home more than ever, but getting packaged products onto grocery store shelves is expensive and the margins are thin. “There’s very few small regional, local food producers making packaged foods who rely entirely on grocery [sales],” says Landa. “That’s one of the things they’re doing, and then they’re also selling at farmers’ markets or doing catering.” Supermarket shelves may be expensive and competitive real estate, but Lilian Ryland aimed to make in-store retail her coronavirus salvation. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Chef Lilian (@naijabukaseattle) on Apr 19, 2019 at 11:04am PDT The year had started off great for Ryland, the sole proprietor of Kent, Washington-based Naija Buka, which is named for the tiny pop-up roadside restaurants in her home country. “In Nigeria the best meals you’ll ever eat are from bukas,” says Ryland. Reliable weekly catering gigs brought in good money without too much stress (she refuses to work weddings), and without too much time away from her children. But when Seattle’s office buildings closed down, there were no corporate workshops or off-site meetings to cater. Office closures also cut into Ryland’s other main gig — preparing freezer-ready meals for busy professionals in her Nigerian expat community. Sales of those meals dropped 68 percent by April. “There was so much uncertainty; a lot of people didn’t want to spend that money to buy food,” Ryland says. “And they were at home, so they could cook.” Fortunately, Ryland had also begun producing shelf-stable sauces — first jollof, and then Everything Sauce — through Seattle’s Food Innovation Network and started pushing them alongside meal kits through social media and her website. But she knew she needed more outlets. In December, Ryland had pitched Naija Buka to PCC Community Markets, a Seattle-based co-op. They agreed to carry a couple sauces on condition that she eliminate vegetable oil and cornstarch. Ryland reworked the recipes, but finding a distributor wasn’t easy. “In Nigeria you can just jump out of your house, sell food, and people just come and buy it,” she says. Seven years ago, before joining her then-fiancé in America, Ryland was a journalist and digital editor in Abuja. She worked at Nordstrom after immigrating until she was eight months pregnant with her first child. She impressed other expats with her Afang soup and jollof, built a reputation at farmers’ markets, then switched to catering corporate events after having her second child. So it was frustrating when her applications and emails to regional food distributors were ignored, and infuriating when she did hear back. “They said, ‘We’re not sure, it’s not something that’s familiar to us’,” she says. “Which is offensive to me. They have a wall full of pasta sauces and here I am with the first ever authentic Nigerian jollof sauce — and you have a huge African community here.” It took five months before the Puget Sound Food Hub, a member-owned cooperative, agreed to distribute her sauces in May. Then, in mid-June, PCC started selling them at their newest location. It was exciting, and a big financial relief. Then, less than a month later, Naija Buka was available at all 14 PCC locations after loyal customers waged an informal campaign demanding greater availability. But not all Rylan’s peers have been so lucky. Fresh food vendors face another set of challenges Shelf-stable products like Meal Mantra curries and Naija Buka sauces can outlast temporary fluctuations in demand. They can be centrally produced and distributed easily. But fresh food vendors also have to be immediately responsive to market changes or their inventory spoils. “For food producers who are used to selling through farmers’ markets, catering, or doing groceries for the grab-and-go section, it’s pretty cost-prohibitive to ship cold unless people are buying a big quantity,” says Landa. Take Oyna Natural Foods. The three-year-old company makes kuku sabzi and other Persian frittatas, and it had just expanded its retail footprint from six to 20 stores early this year. Then, the company’s owners pulled out of the new locations when coronavirus restrictions brought in-store demonstrations to an end. “Education is definitely a huge part of our business,” says Oyna co-founder Mehdi Parnia. Parnia and his wife, Aisan Hoss, built up their culinary reputation face-to-face at farmers’ markets, where they could offer samples, introduce themselves and a little bit of their culture to connect with potential customers. But when it’s sitting alone on a grocery shelf, Parnia found that it is harder to introduce kuku to new markets. Oyna Natural Foods was expected to triple its business this year, according to Parnia. The one-time construction engineer took up food entrepreneurship after immigrating from Tehran to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2013 so Hoss could pursue a career as a choreographer. The couple started 2020 off focused on expansion, attending specialty foods trade shows, meeting store buyers, and finalizing new branding. Instead, when cities shut down, business contracted sharply. Sales at the six stores where Oyna Natural Foods was already established became inconsistent. One week, Parnia would restock his entire inventory, the next week nothing sold. Other small vendors disappeared from the shelves entirely. “The grab-and-go, ready-to-eat meals section has been significantly hit,” says Parnia. “Most of the shoppers were workers wanting to get lunch.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by OynaNaturalfoods (@oynanaturalfoods) on Jun 3, 2019 at 10:19pm PDT Parnia and Hoss rushed to create a web store, photographing kuku and assorted sauces themselves. They now make deliveries once a week throughout the Bay Area. Still, they’re selling about 400 a week as opposed to an average of 2,000 a week last year. They’ve experimented with shipping discounts and deals, and they’re courting new customers through social media, but Parnia finds that his inability to grasp the nuances of American pop-culture render Instagram a foreign language. Social media is “worse than going through the immigration process itself,” he adds. Money is tight. Parnia admits that if La Cocina hadn’t suspended rent they would have stopped production entirely, and even without that overhead the business is in survival mode. But the pressure to keep going is more than financial. “This is like a baby,” says Parnia. “We have been putting a lot of sweat and tears to make this business what it is today. If this goes away, it’s going to be a really, really painful and hard situation for me to figure out what to do.” Get to where the sales are Landa’s pandemic advice to La Cocina members is: “Cut your expenses as much as humanly possible; try to figure out where the sales are.” One such member, Hayward, California-based Alicia’s Tamales Los Mayas, is selling tamales to Bay Area school districts for their lunch programs as an option to be eaten at home during the pandemic. Meal Mantra was able to sell some leftover curry from their Boston College production at cost to a food relief program run by the city of Boston. La Cocina has been reaching out to food critics for reviews, and to national retailers like Williams + Sonoma, which carry assortments of specialty foods and packaged meals. They also sell La Cocina Food Boxes packed with nine items from a rotating cast of members. Oyna Natural Foods has been featured. So has Teranga, the baobab-based juice and energy-bar company from Nafy Flatley. In early 2020, Flatley had her products in almost 40 Bay Area retailers and did frequent in-store demonstrations. Flatley also catered events and she saw the crisis impact her business early on. By late March, roughly half of the stores and cafes selling Teranga products closed or started buying less. “It’s been very hard to see those stores close and [know they] might never come back again,” she says. Farmers’ markets became a stressful and profitless endeavor. Flatley directed customers to her online store and closed her four stands. By mid-March, she was stuck at home with three kids who no longer had schools to go to, trying to devise ways to salvage her business. By the end of the month, she was selling ready-to-heat meals through her website: Maafè one week, Nambè another, Yassa for Independence Day week. “It’s not making up for what we were making before, but at least it’s keeping us on the market,” she says. “It’s keeping us producing. It’s keeping in people’s minds that we’re not closed.” The private meals are more work. It takes longer to package individual portions than to prepare catering trays, and only four businesses at a time are allowed in the La Cocina kitchen, which is half the businesses typically allowed to operate there at a time. There are additional costs as well. Flatley pays extra for eco-friendly containers. She has a reserve of imported baobab and hibiscus, but ginger has doubled in price. “It’s very difficult for me to increase my prices because I don’t believe in selling expensive food,” she says. “Everybody should have good, healthy food and it shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg.” The extra labor is offset by Flatley’s husband, who delivers meals, restocks store shelves, and buys supplies. But he can only help because he is no longer working. The family depends on Teranga now as its sole source of income. “I would like to move forward with all of the goals and plans and ambitions I’ve had since the beginning,” says Flatley. “That’s one of the reasons I immigrated to the United States. I think the American dream is still possible for me and my family.” Flatley, who is from Senegal, worked in marketing before leaving to care for her firstborn son, born premature, and her mother, who was diagnosed with dementia around the same time. Selling the juices and energy bars her family made and sold back home when she was a child through word of mouth led to a new career path that she could balance with family. But, as of early July, she says, revenue had been slashed in half. And while Teranga isn’t operating at a loss, it can’t provide a cushion for emergencies or next steps either. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Teranga (@terangalife) on Nov 2, 2019 at 1:15pm PDT Federal bailout fails small businesses All the entrepreneurs who spoke with Civil Eats for this article are wary of taking on debt, and some distrust banks outright. “I’ve been denied loans because of who I am and what I look like,” says Flatley. “I have good credit. I can show them proof of how the business is sustainable and is growing every year, but they don’t care about that.” However, given the dire circumstances, even wary business owners have looked into federal relief programs this spring. PPP loans were met with widespread confusion over who qualified and how to apply. When eligibility opened to owners, gig workers, and the self-employed, the confusion worsened. Banks were inundated with applications, and those without an existing business relationship with the bank were all but guaranteed to be lost in the chaos. “It’s the big players that have relationships with their banks,” says Meal Mantra’s Bhalla, who doesn’t even have a U.S. credit score. La Cocina was able to secure a PPP loan and keep its full staff, who researched relief programs across the governmental strata. The organization partnered with other San Francisco community agencies, and tried to find the best options for each of their members. Not everyone qualified for assistance, but Landa says that everyone who did apply got it. La Cocina also successfully raised over $500,000 to create an in-house emergency relief fund. But most small food producers don��t have La Cocina in their corner. “It was super confusing the whole time. And they kept changing the rules,” says Landa, noting that she’s a native English speaker born and raised in the U.S., college educated, and familiar with institutions. Anyone newly immigrated, speaking in their second language, or unaccustomed to traditional banking institutions would have found the PPP process impenetrable, she said. None of the entrepreneurs we spoke to received first-round federal relief. Several applied for grants, and some received them. Since she spoke with Civil Eats, Flatley applied for a loan through the Small Business Administration. “I was granted a loan, which is far from enough but I will use that for now until other opportunities come up,” she says. Seeking a path forward As the pandemic rages on, there’s no clear future for most of these small food businesses. In Portland, Oregon, Wambui Machua opened Spice of Africa in mid-February with the intention of serving lamb burgers, curries, and Kenyan tacos in a new food hall — but when that closed down in the spring, she had to sit tight until customers returned in mid-June. But sitting tight didn’t come easy to an ambitious entrepreneur who has been building her business for over a decade, including catering, farmers’ market sales, and classes. After graduating with a degree in business management, she pitched a cooking class to Portland Community College with a home-made brochure. “I started my business to share and educate people about my culture,” says Machua, who hails from the Kikuyu tribe in Central Kenya. Last year, Spice of Africa brought in approximately $100,000, its most successful year. Machua would book three, four, sometimes more gigs in a day, delegating tasks to eight or 10 contract workers as needed. After the coronavirus hit, she worked alone staffing one farmers’ market stall on weekends. There was never any question of shutting down and finding work elsewhere. “My mother says that I’m not employable, because I have been my own person for way too long,” she says. Things could have been worse. Even with a teenage daughter, Machua has low expenses and a stable home. The landlord of her restaurant suspended rent, and the angel investor who backed the kitchen build-out did the same. Regular customers called in bulk orders of samosas to pick up at the farmers’ market. Then, in late June, she accepted an offer to teach an online cooking class. Going virtual would be an adjustment—there would be less dancing, no ability to sample other people’s dishes. But the first virtual class went so well Machua began setting up her own. After three months, restrictions on indoor dining were relaxed in Portland, but Machua wasn’t sure whether customers would feel safe enough to return. She hoped so — she would have to start paying rent again — and had been passing out discount cards at the farmers’ market. But with coronavirus infections climbing, she also didn’t want a crush of customers at the counter. It was time to look into delivery apps and hire a business manager. Everyone Civil Eats spoke to is slowly plotting a path forward. Nafy Flatley worries about the increase of infections in California but remains optimistic about opening a bricks-and-mortar location for Teranga at the Municipal Marketplace, a public-private venture in San Francisco that will offer kitchen and retail space to several La Cocina incubator graduates. Construction has been delayed, but she still holds out hope that it will open. “I have a deep belief that we’ll recover and bounce back and life will be normal again,” Flatley says. “We don’t know when that’s going to be but slowly, step-by-step, we have to walk towards our goals.” Mehdi Parnia wants to make kuku sabzi a regional sensation, then expand the brand nationally. Positive feedback from trade shows, and the interest from retail outlets, gives him reason to believe such growth is possible. For now, Parnia has been in talks with Tastermonial, an online market and food box company catering to people with specific dietary needs. Although Lilian Ryland is doubtful her catering business will rebound, she’s still invested in the Seattle-area food scene. She wants to see local farmers grow crops that African chefs can use instead of dried imports. One earlier attempt at cultivating the scotch bonnet peppers that give her sauces a kick failed, but she believes the Nigerian community alone could drive market demand. Tarun and Anu Bhalla are taking the longview, as they work to find stronger sauce packets for Meal Mantra. As worried as Tarun admits to being, he also believes they have a proven product that will become more popular over time. In the meanwhile, they’ve introduced a few chutneys that they’ve been selling online and at the farmers’ market. As La Cocina’s Landa sees it, the greater community shares some responsibility in supporting small business owners who add diversity to the culinary marketplace, and — through their sauces, dishes, and immersive cooking classes — to the variety and complexity at the heart of American culture. “I’m hoping that there’ll be continued interest in supporting these businesses,” she says. “Pay attention to focusing on smaller, local brands when you do your grocery shopping.” • Immigrant-Led Food Startups Face an Uphill Battle During a Pandemic [Civil Eats] from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3bMdmu5

http://easyfoodnetwork.blogspot.com/2020/09/immigrant-led-food-startups-face-uphill.html

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