Twenty-five years on: a conversation with Priti Shah

It started in a home kitchen, 1999

The first order was fifty plates. A Jain wedding, a Juhu hall, and Priti Shah's home kitchen in Andheri — supplemented by a second oven borrowed from a neighbour. No staff, no branding, no commercial equipment. The entire spread was cooked through the night before and loaded into containers at 6am. It went out on time. The family called back within a week with another booking.

That was 1999. Priti was thirty-two, had two children at home, and had been cooking professionally — in the informal sense that every talented home cook in Mumbai eventually does — for parties, family functions, and friends' events since her mid-twenties. The Jain wedding was the first time money formally changed hands. "I didn't think of it as starting a business," she says now, sitting in her Hubtown Solaris office in Andheri East, where Kravvia's production kitchen occupies the ground floor. "I thought of it as taking a booking seriously."

The first decade: word of mouth and Jain weddings

Between 1999 and 2010, Kravvia — operating under Priti's name before it had a formal brand — grew entirely through referral. The Jain community in Mumbai's western suburbs is tightly networked. A well-executed Jain wedding spreads through that network faster than any advertisement could. By 2005, Priti was handling eight to ten events per month. By 2008, she had her first dedicated cook on payroll.

The Jain wedding remained the anchor. "Every caterer says they do Jain. Very few actually do. I understood early on that a Jain family doesn't want a reassurance — they want to walk the kitchen. So we let them walk the kitchen." The separate Jain prep area, which has remained a non-negotiable feature of every Kravvia kitchen since, was established in the first commercial space Priti rented — a 400-square-foot facility off Marol Naka in 2006.

"Cooking is the easy part. The hard part is consistency — two hundred plates, identical, on time, hot. That's the discipline that most caterers never quite master."

2012: The second kitchen decision

By 2012, demand had outgrown the Marol facility. Priti faced the decision that ends many successful small catering businesses: stay small and excellent, or invest in capacity and risk the consistency that had built the reputation. She chose to invest, opening a second kitchen in Andheri East — larger, better equipped, with separate sections for Jain and standard prep. The team grew to fourteen.

"The second kitchen was the hard year," she says. "Not because of the money — that was manageable. Because I couldn't be in both places at once. I had to trust the cooks I'd trained to make decisions I would have made myself. Some of those decisions were wrong. We learned from them." The quality controls that Kravvia now runs — tasting protocols, temperature checks, portion audits — emerged directly from the mistakes of 2012 and 2013, when the systems had to be formalised because intuition could no longer cover the scale.

2018: The cuisine expansion

For the first decade and a half, Kravvia's menu was north Indian and Jain — with some regional thali work for specific communities. In 2018, Priti made the decision to expand into international cuisines: Thai, Italian, Mexican, Chinese, fusion. The decision was driven by a shift she had observed in Mumbai's event culture. "The crowd was changing. Corporate clients in BKC wanted Thai alongside the dal makhani. Bandra weddings wanted a Mexican counter. The audience had become more adventurous, and I didn't want to be the caterer who couldn't accommodate that."

The expansion required new cooks with different skill sets, new sourcing relationships, and a reformulation of the kitchen's operating protocols. Kravvia brought in specialist cooks for each new cuisine — a Thai-trained cook from a South Mumbai restaurant for the Thai menu, an Italian-trained cook for the pizza and pasta programme. "I didn't try to train existing staff in cuisines they'd never cooked. You learn respect for a cuisine by spending years in it. We hired for that respect."

2022: The retort line

The retort production line — Kravvia's ready-to-eat range — launched in 2022 after two years of development. The concept came from an observation that had been building for years: Kravvia's regular clients wanted the food between events. Not at weddings and corporate dinners, but on a Tuesday at 9pm when no one felt like cooking and delivery meant a 45-minute wait and variable quality.

Retort technology (aseptic thermal processing) allows cooked food to be shelf-stable for up to twelve months without preservatives. The quality retention is significantly higher than conventional canning. "I spent six months eating retort dal makhani before I was satisfied. The texture on reheating, the way the tomato holds, the consistency across batches — it took a long time to get right." The first thirteen SKUs — dal makhani, paneer makhani, chana masala, and the Jain variants — went live in 2025. The response validated the product: Kravvia's ready-to-eat range now ships across India.

"Catering is event-based," she explains. "The retort line lets us be in your kitchen without being in your kitchen. It's not the same as a catered meal — nothing is — but it's the same food, made with the same ingredients, by the same kitchen. That's the proposition."

Women-led, on purpose

Kravvia's mission statement includes a commitment to women-led enterprise that is not decorative. The kitchen team, from line cooks to the production supervisor, is predominantly women. The administrative and operations team is entirely women. Priti has been explicit about this since the beginning — not as a marketing position but as a structural choice. "Catering in India is a women's industry, run by women's knowledge, hidden behind men's faces. The front-of-house is almost always men. The kitchen is almost always women. I wanted to change what the front-of-house looked like."

The practical effect has been a retention rate significantly above the industry average. Kravvia's senior cooks have been with the company for over a decade. In an industry where attrition is constant and institutional knowledge walks out with every departure, that continuity is a competitive asset.

What's next

Priti is reluctant to project timelines — twenty-five years of catering has cured her of false certainty about the future. But the direction is clear: more SKUs in the retort range, a move into the gifting market (corporate Diwali mithai boxes, curated hampers), and a gradual geographic expansion of the catering radius as the kitchen capacity allows. "We've always been Andheri-plus — forty-five minutes from anywhere in Mumbai. That's not changing. What's changing is how we define the event we're serving. A wedding is one kind of event. A Tuesday night at home is another. I want Kravvia in both."

The fifty plates from 1999 have become two thousand a month. The second oven borrowed from the neighbour has been replaced by a commercial kitchen with four deghs running simultaneously and a retort line producing at scale. The Jain wedding that started it is still the anchor — the separate prep area, the walk-the-kitchen offer, the three-question protocol for first-time Jain bookings — unchanged across twenty-five years.

— Priti Shah, in conversation, March 2026