Adukale’s experiential store in Bengaluru offers customers a chance to try, taste and buy

Adukale’s experiential store offers customers a chance to try, taste and buy

Once upon a time, a lady fed up with the political bickering in her region, decided to leave Sengottai in Tamil Nadu. She moved across Coorg with her band of brothers along the River Cauvery and settled in the Mysore-Hassan area. They became the founders of the Sankethi community.

Sankethis speak a mix of Kannada, Tamil and Malayalam, though the written script is Kannada; and their cuisine reflects a similar amalgamation of Southern sensibilities.

“Historically, our community’s love of food and music is well known,” says Bharath Kaushik, CEO and Director of Adukale and the Old Bangalore cafe. “The brand was started in 2009 by my parents M S Ravindra and Nagaratna Ravindra, and my aunt Malathi Sharma in their kitchen. They called it Sankethi Adukale (Adukale means kitchen in most South Indian languages) and the first product they rolled out was rasam powder.”

“My father had a sales background working with General Mills which launched the Pilsbury brand in South and East India. He took up agriculture for a while, and then in 2009, when I moved to the US, he started this venture.”

“My grandmother was an exceptional cook and they wanted to check out the feasibility of commercialising this talent and if there was a market for these products. It started off as a hobby for them when they were in their late 50s and the rest is history,” he says.

Having begun with rasam powder, they moved on to chutney powders and gojjavalakki (a dish of tempered flattened rice). Today, they sell as many as 56 products ranging from masalas and breakfast mixes to ready-to-eat snacks and sweets. According to Bharath, the brand’s growth has been organic via word of mouth, with no active marketing till he joined them in 2017.

“We opened our flagship store in Malleshwaram in 2018. Instead of putting up hoardings, we decided to open a store in a high visibility area, so customers could sample our products.”