One of Alberta`s most remarkable food Success Stories

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MONDAY, MARCH 29, 2004
EDMONTON JOURNAL
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‘One of Alberta’s
most remarkable
food success stories’
Chef Bombay samosas
please the North American palate
BY MAURICE TOUGAS
Can an immigrant couple find success by moving to Sherwood Park,
Alberta to mass-produce a traditional appetizer that is virtually unknown to the
vast majority of North Americans?
What might appear to be a recipe for failure has in fact become one of
Alberta’s most remarkable food success stories.
Aliya’s Foods Ltd., the brainchild of husband and wife team Noorudin and
Anis Jiwani, has in the space of just four years become the undisputed leader
in the production of samosas. The tangy appetizer is known around the world
but still a bit of a mystery to North Americans.
Noorudin is from Kenya, Anis from Uganda. They met and married in
Toronto: Anis is a dietitian, and until becoming the sultan of samosas,
Noorudin worked for 15 years as an actuarial.
Mid-life crisis struck when Noorudin was in his early 40s. The couple came
to Alberta where his uncle, Shiraz Jiwani, a partner in the business, was a
successful builder.
Jiwani gave himself a year to get his idea for a business up and running,
and moved to Sherwood Park in December 1999 with his wife and two
daughters.
At the beginning of 2000, Noorudin sent a blind email to the province of
Alberta, saying that he would like to establish a food manufacturing business,
and that he needed help in testing the recipes and in financing the venture.
The email found its way to Alberta Agriculture, Food and Rural Development. Just a week later and much to his surprise, Jiwani had his government
contact – Allan Pelletier – and the wheels were set in motion.
The Food Processing Development Centre at Leduc provided the technical
support on the recipes, and helped them tweak the traditionally spicy recipes
for the more delicate North American palate. There are plenty of spices in a
samosa – cilantro, ginger, garlic, cumin, cardamom, turmeric, etc. (ground by
Chef Bombay to preserve their freshness) – and it took a while to find just
the right combination. They tested a range of flavours, from spicy to mild, on
focus groups. In true Canadian fashion, the focus groups chose the middle.
“The focus groups came back with a middle of the line taste – they wanted
a little kick, but not too much kick, and we don’t want no kick at all.”
A much bigger problem was finding a machine that could make samosas.
“It takes about two minutes for a person to fold a samosa together,” Jiwani says.
“That would have been very labour intensive.”
Like all companies in Alberta, food safety
is paramount. In order to reach the critical
U.S. market, the company has to meet the
standards of an international food safety
program called HACCP (Hazard Analysis
Critical Control Points), that ensures every
finished product can be “traced back to the
last grain of salt.” Canadian Food Inspection
Agency experts guided the Jiwanis through
the maze of regulations that food manufacturers must navigate in order to do business.
Using the services of a marketing firm,
J. Tang and Associates, the image and
branding of Chef Bombay brand samosas
began to take shape.
The equipment was in place, the finances
were good, and the company had a name and
a look. The unanswered question was, would
they sell? Or for that matter, how many even
knew what a samosa was?
Popular in various forms all over the Middle East and in the East Indian culture,
samosas are thin pastry triangles stuffed with
a spicy melange of ingredients. Larger than a
typical North American appetizer, samosas fall somewhere between
appetizer and meal. Was there room on North America’s already overfilled plate
for another appetizer?
By November of 2000, the first batch of Chef Bombay samosas came off
the line. It didn’t exactly set the market on fire – from November 2000 to March
2001, the company racked up $65 in sales.
By November of 2000, the first batch of
Chef Bombay samosas came off the line.
So Noorudin and Anis began a search for machinery that could do the tedious
work quickly and on a large scale. Their search led them to the Far East,
where they found a company that made machinery that mass-produced
spring rolls. Three months later, with the financial help of the Agriculture
Financial Services Corporation, the Jiwanis had the heart of their operation –
the world’s first samosa-making machine.
Other obstacles cropped up. Finding a pastry that would retain its crispness
after being cooked, frozen and reheated was particularly challenging.
“We must have tried a hundred different kinds of combinations before we
got it right,” he says. And indeed, the samosas retain a crispiness rare among
frozen food products.
Watch for a Special News Report
on Alberta’s Agriculture
and Food Industry appearing
in the Edmonton Journal and
Calgary Herald on
Wednesday, April 14, 2004.
For more information
contact Sandra Marocco
at (780) 429-5441 or visit
Ag Feature
WATCH FOR...
The team at Aliya's Foods, from left to right: Controller Anoop Agarwal;
Production Supervisor Imamuddin Saifee; V-P Operations Anis Jiwani;
CEO Noorudin Jiwani.
In the early days, they gave away a lot more samosas than they sold. They
sent samosa gift packages to clients of his uncle and partner Shiraz, just to get
people accustomed to what a samosa was. According to market research they
conducted, only five per cent of people knew what a samosa was, so there
was plenty of educating to do.
Jiwani found out the hard way that getting your product into stores takes time.
Decisions by big corporations like Safeway, Sobey’s and other major food
retailers are not made overnight.
The company also found out that the large food service companies that
supply restaurants wouldn’t stock Chef Bombay unless the company could
prove that it had a list of clients. So the company hit the road, selling the samosas
to individual restaurants until they reached a point that the food distributors
had to say yes.
“Once they came on board, distribution was a lot easier.”
The sales breakthrough came courtesy of Costco in eastern Canada in March
2001. Jiwani hadn’t intended to go to grocery stores initially; the original plan
was to get the samosas into restaurants through the large food service
companies. But when a company like Costco comes knocking, you don’t say
no. The Costco order got the plant up to full capacity.
After Costco, the other major supermarkets came on board. Safeway, Sobey’s,
Save-On Foods, Co-ops and Superstore all stock Chef Bombay brand samosas
in the frozen foods section, as well as in the delis. Safeway’s house brand,
Gourmet Meat Shop samosas, are made by Chef Bombay.
Another milestone came in late 2001, when an unexpected opening came
up to supply Costco stores in the densely populated northeastern U.S. Costco
stocked the samosas in 11 locations to gauge public acceptance. They were
a hit, and today all 63 Costco outlets in the northeastern U.S. carry Chef
Bombay – but only from July to January. Costco considers it a seasonal
appetizer, so once the Super Bowl is over, Chef Bombay disappears until
July. Still, that six-month window is large enough that Chef Bombay puts
on a double shift to meet demand.
And just this month, all Loblaw’s store delis from Ontario east began to
carry the Chef Bombay samosa.
An unexpected boost in sales came after Chef Bombay obtained its
Halal certification.
“What kosher is to Jewish, Halal is to Muslim,” Jiwani explains.
Originally Jiwani thought the Halal certification wouldn’t have much of
an impact, but it carried a lot of weight in the large Muslim community in the
U.S. As soon as the company had its certification (displayed on the box),
sales in the U.S. grew by 20 per cent.
Chef Bombay’s
success has been meteoric. The company
has enjoyed tripledigit growth for all
three years of its existence. The company is already where
Jiwani thought it
would be after six or
seven years.
Production of the
samosas is a marvel
of efficiency. Only
five people are needed in production per
shift to supervise the
“filling, folding,
frying and freezing”
of some 15,000
samosas (25,000
when the Costco
U.S. order needs to
be filled). And concerns that North Americans might not take to samosas appear to have been
unfounded. According to the AC Nielsen Company, sales of samosa in
2002-2003 rose by 11 per cent – predominantly because of Chef Bombay.
In the fall of 2003, Aliya’s received an award from New Business
Innovation from the Sherwood Park Chamber of Commerce. Last month, the
company won the Agrivalue New Venture Award, presented by the Alberta
Business Awards of Distinction, sponsored by AVAC.
... another Agriculture and Food Industry Leaders Profile next Monday.