The Little Food Company … Catering for YOU

A self-taught chef, Bhakti grew with her company, traveling the world and drawing inspiration from modern European, American and Asian cuisine, and constantly adding new recipes and ideas to the mix. Food styling, working with restaurants on menu development, recipe testing, kitchen planning, and training – If it’s about food, chances are Bhakti’s had a hand in it.

From 2005 to 2010 Bhakti Mehta worked as an advertising and media professional. She loved cooking and was extremely passionate about food. Despite working with a television channel (2009-2010) on weekends she was still left with a lot of free time on her hands. It was around this period that she did a small catering gig for a friends fashion store simply out of sheer fun. But it was executed so well that it got written about in the newspapers and media;the reason for this being the unique food items like - wasabi hummus, thai style paani puri et al - that were served at the event . 

This was the beginning of Bhakti’s journey in the food industry. She was flooded with catering orders and no one was ready to listen to a ‘No’! So while she worked from Monday to Friday with the media company; her weekends were devoted to catering for home gigs. She shares “I used to cook and go for the catering accompanied with just one helper and one server. In fact it’s a matter of deep pride that back then the Little Food Company was amongst the first few gourmet catering services for homes – as opposed to the ‘Maharaj’ (cook), restaurant or wedding caterers!”

This continued for the next 9 months post which Bhakti quit her media job and continued with the Little Food Company. And this is how between 2010 and 2020 something that was intended to be a weekend passion project grew into a Gourmet Catering Company.

Bhakti elaborates on the story behind the brand name “Well this venture was basically supposed to be a weekend project and when I launched it I was 24 years old and stood at 5 feet hence the term ‘Little”; then again I was opting for catering that’s how the word ‘food’ came in… so basically The Little Food Company means a ‘little food company by a little girl’”

The Little Food Company is renowned for its appetizers, presentation and Mexican fare. In fact as Mexican cuisine has been Bhakti’s pet project the same is reflected in the menu as it has radically evolved over the last 10 years. 

The Little Food Company had shut their catering service before the lockdown was announced with the sole objective of ensuring the safety and health of the entire staff. The next steps in Bhakti’s words - “We then quickly pivoted our then delivery business, which was a healthy subscription service prior to the pandemic, to our party catering favourites onto the delivery menu and that’s what we've been doing since the last six months now. At first people were sceptical to even order out, people were enjoying cooking at home;which has made things extremely challenging for us … but we have survived with the help of a very, very determined team! The menu is slightly modified every two weeks, and that’s helped us keep going in these turbulent times. We recently did a special seven-course Mexican Meal delivered in a box with props, name tags and menus – making it literally our catering experience fitted in a box!”

 

Bhakti has her act in order to tackle the upcoming wedding and festive season abiding by all the COVID-19 SOPs. While currently the LFC is focussing only on food delivery; they are preparing for catering services from the third week of October. In the pipeline are precautions like – testing all the employees prior to any event; ensuring that they wear PPE suits; reducing the number of staff at each event; increasing the grazing stations to cut down on service; minimizing staff interactions; besides of course ensuring SMS (social distancing, masking and sanitizing). Alongside this Bhakti also intends to check with the clients with regards to the precautions that they are planning for the guests as well. Because the onus to keep everyone safe rests with all involved be it the client, the caterers, the guests or the venue partner.

 

 

 

Bhakti signs off with a motivating message for our home entrepreneur segment “Well, as entrepreneurs this may have been the hardest time we will see, and it has been excruciatingly painful and unimaginable to be honest. But, when I talk about myself it also made me think out-of-the-box, it challenged me to change the way we work, it made me cut out the unnecessary frills and instead focus on what really matters. And the same was reciprocated by our consumers too. So it allowed us to change the game bit- by-bit and it has only made us stronger! We shall all emerge like the proverbial Phoenix from this disaster too!”