Eleven years, one recipe at a time
Jayashree moved to Auckland from India in 2001. Cooking had always been part of her life — but it became a business almost by accident, one order at a time, for family, then friends, then friends of friends.
Growing up in Mumbai — a city where street food is practically its own language — gave her an instinct for gaps in a market. When she started cooking commercially, few in Auckland were serving real Mumbai-style street food; she built the menu around exactly those dishes. That instinct hasn't changed — new additions to the menu are still often the dish nobody else in Auckland's Indian food scene is quite doing yet.
When she started Samruddhi Veg Foods in 2015, she made a deliberate choice: no advertising. Instead, she used WhatsApp Broadcast — ahead of most small food businesses at the time — to keep in touch with customers directly, one message reaching everyone who wanted to know what was cooking that week.
It wasn't just about saving on ads. It was a genuinely different way of running a food business: the week's menu went out first, customers ordered ahead, and only the exact quantity ordered was ever cooked — nothing stockpiled, nothing thrown away. At a time when everyone around her was opening restaurants built to stock and guess at demand in advance, this made-to-order model barely had a name yet — the "cloud kitchen" concept didn't really exist.
"I never needed an advertisement. Just people telling people."
That's still how it works today. Every dish on the menu has been made, refined, and reordered by real customers for over a decade — long before any of it reached a camera.
Menu First
The week's menu goes out before a single dish is cooked.
Made to Order
Every dish is cooked only once it's been ordered — never in advance, never a guess.
Zero Wastage
No stockpiling, no leftover storage — a model restaurants aren't built to run.
