Mumbai’s Parsi Dairy Farm will get a brand new look

Inside Parsi dairy farm
| Picture Credit score: Manan Surti

Zeenia Okay Patel has a definite reminiscence of her elder cousin brother Bakhtyar Okay Irani sneaking inside one of many backrooms of the Parsi Dairy Farm (PDF) and getting chocolate chips for her and her siblings to share. “He would fake that solely he knew the place to get them, making us wait exterior a closed door. A yr or two later, he misplaced his energy after we realised all of us may go inside and get them on our personal!” she chuckles on the reminiscence, whereas her sister Parvana S Mistry remembers fondly the candy odor of fried jalebi from their karkhana (manufacturing unit) throughout the highway. 

Zeenia (36), Parvana (35) and their cousins Bakhtyar (41) and Sarfaraz Okay Irani (38) are the great-grandchildren of Nariman Ardeshir, the Parsi gentleman who opened the enduring Parsi Dairy Farm at Princess Road in South Bombay in 1916 with — as legend has it — a single can of milk. The fourth era of the household — Zeenia and Parvana’s mom, Meheru Okay Patel and Sarfaraz and Bakhtyar’s mom Shernaz Okay Irani, are sisters, who grew up listening to tales about their nice grandfather and the way he began the enterprise, which continues to be one of many few single family-owned manufacturers within the nation.

“Mr Ardeshir misplaced his father very early in life and needed to be taught to make ends meet from a younger age. He grew up across the Kalbadevi and Princess Road space and café house owners would generally ask him to sit down on the galla (cost counter) on their behalf each time they wished a break. That’s the place he picked up his entrepreneurial abilities,” Bakhtyar recounts the story informed to him by his grandfather. “I’ve additionally heard that he equipped lemonade to the armed forces throughout World Struggle II,” he provides.

What began as a household dairy store tucked away on a busy Bombay avenue 107 years in the past grew to change into a family identify with a generational legacy that stood for purity, high quality and flavour. Males in blue and khaki uniforms with the PDF brand of the buffalo have been at one time a well-known sight within the metropolis, ringing the bell very first thing within the morning to ship milk to the patrons. The PDF farms, unfold over 300 acres in Talasari on the outskirts of Maharashtra, proceed to breed livestock for the milk wanted for his or her ghee, paneer, Indian mithais, kulfis, yoghurt and extra.

Which is why, when the fourth era of the household determined to offer the bodily retailer and the packaging a brand new feel and appear, a number of thought and analysis went into it. “We’ve got labored in and across the enterprise for nearly 20 years now and have devoted the final couple of years to understanding our audience and the place we wish to take our enterprise. We’re all at that age the place we will push extra and take the model to the following stage,” says Zeenia, who’s overseeing the branding and advertising.

Amidst the boring brown and gray of the adjoining retailers and buildings, the brilliant pink door and the blue paint on the partitions of the newly-revamped PDF might be simply noticed even from hundred metres away. Step inside and you’d be forgiven for pondering you might be at Willy Wonka’s chocolate manufacturing unit, besides that this shares ‘dairy and delights’, as Zeenia places it. Black and white pictures of a number of the model’s cherished previous take up one a part of the nook wall at the same time as your eyes are drawn in direction of the glass counter displaying Indian mithais akin to raspberry khopra pak, piped jalebi, bundi laddoo, kaju katli and their well-known sutarfeni (a Gujarati candy) amongst others.

Stacked in corners are vibrant packing containers to pack the group favorite kulfis which might be out there in eight flavours. A number of the repackaging additionally contains renaming their ‘milk drop toffees’ to ‘the nice Indian toffee’ and designing user-friendly ghee jars that tilt in order that even the previous few drops of the wealthy, granulated ghee might be scooped out with ease. As well as, they’ve launched two new merchandise together with a chai masala and a milk masala and plan to give you quite a lot of cheeses quickly.

Parvana, who has performed a course in French delicacies and patisserie from the Le Cordon Bleu and is taking care of the manufacturing at PDF, says that they’ve a treasure of conventional recipes handed right down to them which has been systemised so as to scale up and attain a bigger viewers. “We don’t add any preservative or synthetic flavourings. We’ve got additionally not modified a number of the conventional strategies, which incorporates making curd in earthen pots,” she provides.

It’s with this mix of custom and modernity that the 4 hope to retain their loyal prospects in addition to enchantment to the youthful era. “Just some days in the past, I used to be telling a buyer that I’m from the fourth era of the household that owns this place and he informed me that he’s from the fourth era from his household to be shopping for our merchandise!” guffaws Bakhtyar.

Parsi Dairy Farm merchandise can be found in retail shops throughout Mumbai, Pune, Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, Vapi, Bhavnagar, Surat, Kolkata, Guwahati, Aurangabad and Nagpur. On-line, they’re out there on Amazon, Bigbasket, Jio mart, Swiggy and Zomato.