Back in 2015, if you had asked international trade and investment consultant, Namrata Sundaresan, if she was going to transform her Coonoor vacation cheesemaking experience into a multi-crore business she would have burst out laughing before responding, “I have better things to do than to make cheese.” Nevertheless, being a foodie at heart and the quintessential host who is happiest when feeding her guests exotic dishes discovered in her travels, it did not come as much of a surprise that she eventually found herself in the food industry.
Without a business plan of any sort, Käse started as a short-term project inspired by Namrata’s recent travels, taking shape at her partner, Anuradha Krishnamoorthy’s CSR venture to teach young girls with disabilities the art of cheesemaking.
Based in Chennai, the land of perpetual summer, filter coffee and fresh buttermilk, the small-scale cheese business came with its fair share of scepticism and hurdles. Sourcing the right kind of milk for instance. “We very quickly realised that we couldn’t make cheese with Aavin milk and had to source milk from a local milkman,” she recalls with another
