For connoisseurs of all fine things, cheese is a favourite but you seldom find local flavours infused into organic cheese, let alone have a lot of options for artisanal cheeses around. Käse Cheese, run by Anuradha Krishnamoorthy and Namrata Sundaresan, offers cheese lovers milagai podi cheese, as well as their own version of matured blue cheese. Something for everyone, Anuradha and Namrata started Käse in 2016 when they realised that artisanal cheese was something they could bring to Chennai, a city that is increasingly becoming a gamut of the finer things in life. “Cheesemaking is something that I learnt on a holiday. Anuradha and I were talking one day and she said she wanted a group of girls to be trained on baking skills. That’s when I realised that baking wasn’t something new considering it has quite a market. Cheesemaking, however, especially artisanal cheese, is relatively new here,” says Namrata. Following clean eating, their cheese use A2 organic milk and are very serious when it comes to using locally sourced ingredients, bereft of anything processed. They started out by making 5 kgs a week and now make around 50-100 kgs. “It’s always been encouraging for us, right from our colleagues and family. Both of us are in our early 40s and we have been entrepreneurs for a while now. We are not really new to this, and we come from a very encouraging ecosystem. Especially since ours has a social angle to it, where we work with women disabilities and train them on so many skills.”
An advice they have for women who wish to put their entrepreneurship skills to use – Identify your space. “You need to ask yourself if you are looking into a scalable business or lifestyle business. Secondly, you need to understand your customers. Thirdly, you have to understand your competition. Don’t be scared of competition, but be open to enormous opportunities where you can collaborate with someone else, adding your strength and somebody else’s strength for something big.”