Say Cheese

CELEBRATED CHEF Manish Mehrotra distinctly remembers that day in 2009 when a well-meaning guest at Indian Accent asked for him at her table and whispered into his ear: “Chef, I don’t want to say it loudly, but I think the cheese in the naan is off.”

She had just bitten into the chef’s blue cheese naan – his ode to the little block of Stilton he tasted as a hotel management student in Mumbai – and there was nothing wrong with it. What was off was the guest’s knowledge of cheeses –the Danish Blue that had gone into the naan was too flavourful for her taste buds. The chef sportingly replaced the naan platter with one made with the more familiar Amul cheese.

Pan forward to 2025, and the naan now enjoys an iconic status even as patrons of Delhi’s Olive Bar & Kitchen can’t seem to get enough of the blue cheese ice-cream sundae in which the principal ingredi­ent is the Stilton-inspired Nilah from Mumbai based artisanal cheesemaker Eleftheria. Ask Olive’s Head Chef, Pranav Sharma, and he lists a host of other dishes where local cheeses find expression, from baked morels paired with Mountain Zerai, a spice-rubbed young cheese sourced from Darima Farms located at an altitude of 7,000ft near Mukteshwar, Utta­rakhand, to a Sorrentino pasta perked up with smoked Bandel Cheese from Begum Victoria, Bengaluru.

If you check with Ayesha Grewal, a trained cheesemaker and founder of The Altitude Store, the oldest in Delhi- NCR dedicated to organic foods, she’ll recommend her Raclette a la Altitude, a classical Swiss cheese dish made with the nutty chhurpi produced from yak’s milk in Himalayan villages. Randeep Bajaj, owner of Arts Room, a restaurant in Delhi’s ultra-chic Eldeco Centre, takes pride in rattling off the names of artisanal varieties on his cheese board.

Sharing the spotlight are Parmesan from Old Hill, based out of Muktesh­war, Uttarakhand, besides Brunost (a Norwegian-style brown cheese) and Belper Knolle (the Swiss-style cheese traditionally associated with the city of Belp in Switzerland) from Elefthe­ria, and smoked Bandel Cheese from Kolkata that the Arts Room chef, Parth Saxena, uses to make cheesecake.

Handmade cheeses are now pro­duced in just about every corner of the country – from Kozhikode’s Queso Kanthari spiked with bird’s eye chillies to Dibrugarh’s Bhoot Jolokia cheddar, from Tomme de Bombai inspired by the French Alpine cheese Tomme de Savoie to camel milk feta from Udaipur – cater­ing to a mushrooming market. It is this vibrant market that LOTS Wholesale Solutions, Thailand’s B2B cash-and-car­ry operator which recently added India to its global retail footprint, seeks to tap with its artisanal cheese collection. It has 36 distinct varieties sourced from eight different places across India, such as the award-winning cheddar infused with lavender made by Chennai’s Käse Cheese to an American-style Dry Jack from pepped up with black pepper and coffee from Dibrugarh, Assam.

India seems to be in the throes of a ‘whey revolution’ – this ‘whey’ being the state of milk that goes into making cheese, and not the one synonymous with protein supplements. Riding the surge, the country today produces 70,000 metric tonnes (MT) of cheese (both processed and artisanal), seven times more than the 10,000 MT made in 2010, according to the Pune-based Team Dairy Experts.

Industry insiders, such as Prateeksh Mehra, co-founder of Mumbai’s The Spotted Cow Fromagerie, attribute this phenomenal market expansion, away from imported cheese to artisanal variet­ies, to three factors. The evolved palate of a new class of consumers, young, outwardly mobile and educated abroad, seeking out international gourmet experiences. Then, the unhappiness of chefs in five-star hotels, who, pre-Covid, were the main buyers of international cheese brands, with imported products that arrived without much freshness or character, thanks to a broken-down cold chain. Finally, the restrictions imposed by the Food Safety and Standards Au­thority of India (FSSAI) on imports and its crackdown on the rampant practice of mislabelling imported cheese.

The most important driver, though, has been the entry of passion-led entrepre­neurs, who, like the mice named Sniff and Scurry in Dr Spencer Johnson’s corporate parable, Who Moved My Cheese?, sniffed a business opportunity and scurried in to make the most of it. As Eleftheria’s found­er Mausam Narang puts it, “We saw an opportunity to bridge the quality gap by creating world-class cheeses using locally sourced milk, inspired by global traditions but rooted in Indian craftsmanship.”

Cheesemaking in India is no longer a business where the pioneers could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Pioneers such as Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak director, Mansoor Khan, who retired to his Acres Wild farm in Coonnoor, Tamil Nadu, to make international cheese varieties, Auroville’s Benny Ernst, the presiding deity of La Ferme Cheese for the past 24 years, who looks straight out of an Asterix comic, or Sunil Bhu, the founder of Flanders who churns out a tonne of cheese (mainly mozzarella, bur­rata and bocconcini) a day.

Providing the cheesemakers mo­mentum is the new consumer who, in Narang’s words, “has become increas­ingly curious and experimental with food, with travel, social media and global dining experiences playing a big role. People now understand that cheese isn’t just mozzarella or cheddar; it’s a world of textures, aromas, and stories.”

The Covid years accelerated this shift. “As people cooked more at home, they started exploring premium ingredients and small-batch products,” explains Narang. “Cheese boards, wine pairings, and comfort cook­ing became a trend and that awareness has continued post-pandemic, with more appreciation for handcrafted, high-quality cheese.”

Cheese boards have returned in a big way and grazing tables are spurring demand for artisanal cheese. Gurugram-based hospitality professional-turned-promoter of grazing tables Kushagra Nagrath, together with his wife Namita, who’s with the cabin crew of an airline, began putting together cheese boards under the banner The Amazin Graze when both were grounded at home because of Covid. Today, their business has expanded so fast that they have had to shift from a cor­ner of their home to a 2,500sq ft kitchen studio in a Gurugram condominium. Their average grazing table extends to 18 feet, of which 25 per cent is taken up by cheese. “Just on the two Diwali days (October 19-20),” informs Kushagra, “we sold 15kg of artisanal cheese.”

The Nagraths’ cheese line-up almost always includes fresh burrata from The Spotted Cow Fromagerie, fontina from Francois and Debarati Laederich’s Amiksa nestled in the Mashobra Valley near Shimla and Käse chilli-infused Tomme (christened Toma de Käse). Locally produced cream cheese goes into the sourdough dip bowls that are the new must-have on every grazing table.

The new band of cheese-making entre­preneurs are as diverse as the products they sell. Take for instance the brothers Prateeksh and Agnay Mehra who run The Spotted Cow Fromagerie, which they launched from the basement of their home in Dahisar, Mumbai, in 2015. Prateeksh is a commercial photographer, who got interested in cheese while on shooting assignments for the now-defunct BBC Good Food India, and Agnay was a hospitality professional who had pivoted to pro­ducing promos for the film industry.

Father KL Michael, who introduced India to the hugely popular soft cheese burrata (a favourite of Prithvi Raj Singh ‘Bicky’ Oberoi, late chairman of The Oberoi Group), is a Benedictine monk from Kerala who studied cheesemak­ing at a monastery in Vallombrosa in Tuscany, Italy. On returning to India, he established a factory named after the monastery on the outskirts of Benga­luru in 2004. Since then, the products of Vallombrosa Cheese have been picked up by five-star hotels and upscale stores across the country. The local Benedictine congregation spends the earnings to pay for the education of slum children and run a seminary for young men.

In the Kashmir Valley, Chris Zandee, a Dutch farmer’s son who has put the mozzarella-like Kalari produced by Gujjar herdsmen on the international cheese map, had studied to be an automotive en­gineer back in The Netherlands. Today, he can look back at his life philosophically and say, “It is not what you study but what you do and how you develop yourself that defines you. Many people never end up doing what they study for.” Zandee retails his cheeses under the Himalayan Products label.

EXAMPLES SUCH AS these are becoming commonplace. Nara­ng’s last full-time position, before she founded Eleftheria five years ago, was that of HR Business Partner at Capgemini Engineering. In Kerala, Monisha Indule­kha, a microbiologist who got interested in cheesemaking after savouring fresh mozzarella at a wedding in Italy, made a career switch and launched Moonrocket Cheese Company in her hometown Kozhikode in 2023.

The founders of Darima Farms, which produces cheeses with milk sourced from single cow households spread across 11 villages in the Kumaon region, are Arvind Chawla, a business­man based out of Delhi, and Sourabh Vinayak, a real estate developer operating in Uttarakhand. Delhi-based Amit Mittal, creator of the popular brand Kumaoni Blessings, whose Camembert is one of Manish Mehrotra’s favourites, was 56 years old when he decided to become a cheesemaker after mastering the craft under an Italian producer.

“I was at the fag end of my job with a Swiss company dealing in postal franking machines, which was a dying business,” says Mittal, an engineer by training. He launched Kumaoni Blessings in 2019 and his celebrity moment came when former MasterChef Australia co-host Gary Mehigan showcased Mittal’s offer­ings at a workshop he was conducting for 150 women at a five-star hotel in Kolkata.

In Chennai, before she co-founded Kirke Cheese, the company behind Käse, in 2016, Namrata Sundaresan spent 15 years in international trade and investment and then trained to become a certified cheesemaker at the School of the New American Farmstead at Sterling College, Vermont (USA). She is India’s only training partner for the Academy of Cheese, a UK-based non-profit organisation offering Master of Cheese accreditation. Her business partner (and “backbone of Käse”), Anuradha Krishnamoorthy, has spent two decades in the social sector and heads Can Do, a skill development initiative for people with disabilities. Käse (the German word for ‘cheese’), in fact, was born as a project to provide employment to young women with disabilities.

Of course, with opportunities come challenges. Grewal of The Altitude Store points out that the nascent artisanal cot­tage industry doesn’t have the advantage of centuries of tradition backing its Euro­pean peers. Moreover, being self-funded and therefore cash-strapped, Indian cheesemakers do not have the luxury of maintaining large inventories or taking the risk of aging cheese for more than four to six months. They need to move their stock to keep the cash flowing. Indian artisanal cheeses, as a result, have not yet reached the league of European heavy-hitters in every respect, but to quote Grewal, “we are up there when it comes to Brie- and Camembert-style cheeses”.

India’s artisanal cheese industry is at an inflection point, and new entre­preneurs are raring to reach out to the world. After Michelin-starred restau­rants, top-rated whiskies and world-class coffee, cheese promises to be the next big thing in the Indian food and beverage space.