California Almonds & Almond Growers
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I fell into it because I was visiting quite often while I was studying in Canada. After college, I just could not detach myself from it. Once you get sucked into something, it gets difficult to crawl back out of it. Once you taste the adrenalin rush from the hustle, it’s difficult to get out of it.
Food safety is important for us. Because your customers are our customers
As Chaitanya begins the tour, he tells us that the floor also serves as their security area and has lockers for the staff. “The footwear and the clothes they wear when they come to work, do not cross this level. The entire kitchen team switches to their workwear and proceeds to other floors. Here the raw material is sorted, along with checking for quality before they are dispatched to the kitchens,” says Chaitanya. From what I’ve seen and heard about sweetmeat shops, I was expecting people to walk around in shorts in a place that would stink of boiling milk, flowing brine and so on. Yet I went with open mind to see the back-end of a sweet store’s central kitchen.
SWEETS
We have cultivated relationships with food companies in more than 50 countries, from leading multinational brands to small operations with big ambitions. We adapt our almond products to cultural preferences and regulatory nuances, so that they can meet or exceed local quality standards. When you say it’s a values-driven business, where do these values stem from?
Treehouse Almonds
We had all the baggage of an old business without any of the advantages of a start-up. Now, we have a team and we are really lucky to have good people. We are a value-driven business, so our goal is that as we scale, we don’t dilute those values. That makes growth slow, because you just can’t hire anybody — you need to let them understand the culture and make sure your culture is not diluting.
The floor below this is where khoa for the day’s requirement is made. The process of mixing khoa with sugar, sorting nuts — all happen here. Whom do you confide in while making important business decisions? At the end of the day, the buck stops here, right? That’s true for any business; however big or small it is, you have to take responsibility for it. In our system, I am accountable to my team and not the other way round.
First laser-equipped electric sorting machines go online, dramatically reducing foreign material in almond products. Desi sweets have a special place in every Indian’s heart. And every desi has a favourite thing to pick from their preferred sweet shop. So, when I was at the new Almond Shop, a four-storeyed building, all I was interested was to know how my favourite langcha and boondi laddoos are made. All this, however, was not in Chaitanya’s plans when he set out for Canada in 2015 to earn himself a business degree.
We have an objective that every year or two we need to launch a new brand. We are now working on creating an arsenal of brands that we can scale up individually. Each one has an individual team, head and strategy. They all work together wherever they can, wherever the synergy is.
Food Safety &Quality Systems
I bounce my ideas off anybody I can find, be it a consumer, an expert, a specialist, etc. When did you know that business was the thing for you? I didn’t know I had to do what I had to do till I was doing it. The business was started by my father (in 1989 at Himayatnagar), who is a chemical engineer from BITS-Pilani. He wanted to do something small and conducted a market-gap analysis.
Almond ambulance hits house, plunges into creek - Hornell Evening Tribune
Almond ambulance hits house, plunges into creek.
Posted: Fri, 07 Oct 2016 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments. “Stanford Seed sends world-renowned faculty and facilitators from Stanford University and other renowned experts to provide business training to owners of small-to-medium sized businesses like us. This was the best way to give a new direction to our business, I felt,” recalls Chaitanya. Seed is a Stanford Graduate School of Business-led initiative working to end the cycle of global poverty.
He was sure he wasn’t coming back to run a ‘sweet shop’. He was wary of being called a halwai (a person who makes sweets). “That was to understand how everything works from close quarters,” he says. Premier blanching and manufacturing equipment is installed with integrated RTE (ready-to-eat) building design to meet market need for a higher-quality almond supplier. What appeared to me as the basement was a spotlessly clean central store house for the kitchen.
I’ve built this business around what I like to do, my interests and what keeps me going. Creating brands, creating products — these are things that I am interested in. Customised machinery minimises use of hands in handling raw materials and preparation of sweets. Chaitanya reveals, “We have tweaked its functions and machinery to make it work best for us. The less the food comes in contact with hand, the better its shelf life.
But speaking of hobbies and passions, we tend to integrate it into our business. For example, for the last three years, I’ve been working with farmers in West Godavari to find and create high-quality cocoa so that we can launch our own chocolate brand. What started as an adventure (to launch a chocolate brand) became an agri business. The point I’m making here is, you find an itch and to scratch that you build a business around it so that you can make something meaningful out of it. But I’ve been unsuccessful when it comes to balancing work and life.
Bang opposite every kitchen is the assembling section, to ensure that the final product is made fresh. It was a joy to see fresh Mysore pak being cut in neat squares and packed with the speed of light by expert hands. Even a slo-mo video cannot catch the movement of the hands while packing.
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