Your name: Preena Chauhan

Year the company was started:  Arvinda’s Indian cooking classes started in 1993

Where are the products made?

Freshly ground and blended in Mississauga, Ontario

What is the ‘key ingredient’ that makes your product line special? 

At Arvinda’s, we take a back-to-basics approach to Indian cooking with the finest spices, traditional recipes and simple steps to making the cuisine accessible for today's home cook.

What motivated you to start your company and create the products that we see today? 

In 1993, my mom, Arvinda Chauhan, started teaching Indian cooking classes in Oakville, Ontario, when she lovingly offered samples of our family spice blend, Arvinda’s Curry Masala to help her students simplify scratch Indian cooking with a healthy flair. The spice blend was a hit, and her students wanted to get more!

Fast forward several years, my brother Paresh and I saw an opportunity in the grocery market for locally-made, high-quality, Indian spice blends, and we began our entrepreneurial journey. We started manufacturing our products in an industrial unit in Oakville, later moving to a larger production facility in Mississauga, Ontario. Inspired by our mother, Arvinda, we siblings wanted to share the true essence of Indian cooking and our passion for spices with others.

What are your company’s core values?

At Arvinda’s, we have a love and excitement for delicious, healthy home-cooked meals, and our family created Arvinda’s spice blends rooted in tradition to simplify Indian cuisine, presenting them to today’s consumers who are hungry for authentic global flavours.

Every Arvinda’s spice blend is made with a commitment to freshness, quality, and heritage.

We proudly make all our blends in Canada using local ingredients, including Ontario organic garlic, passionately crafting them according to our traditional family recipes. From the launch of our brand, we always wanted to support Canadian farmers, so we made a commitment to sourcing local where possible.

Arvinda’s is clean label, formulated without additives, preservatives, artificial colourings, wheat, soy, dairy, sugar, MSG, oils, or nuts.

Our packaging is sustainable - Arvinda’s tins are reusable and recyclable and Arvinda’s stand-up pouches are #2 recyclable. Over the years, we’ve donated our spices and time to organizations, community kitchens and shelters, and our company continues to look for ways to support local.

If you could tell a retailer three things about what makes your brand different, what would they be? 

1.      Flavour-first and trusted: Freshly ground and blend in Canada for rich flavours and expertly balanced by culinary professionals who have taught Indian cooking for over 30 years and are authors of the award-winning Indian cookbook, New Indian Basics.

2.      From family recipe to store shelves: Arvinda’s spice blends are crafted from cherished family recipes rooted in heritage. Arvinda’s is non-GMO verified, kosher certified, vegan and gluten-free.

3.      Truly Canadian: We support local farmers by using Ontario organic garlic and other local ingredients, bridging Indian cuisine with Canada’s world-class ingredients.

What are some challenges you’ve had to overcome to bring your business to its current state?

As our brand expanded beyond cooking class students and farmers’ markets, one of our biggest challenges was preserving the same flavour profile and balance that our customers had come to love. Because our products come from traditional family recipes, it was deeply important to us to honour our roots by keeping them as true to the originals as possible as production scaled up

What do you enjoy doing outside of work?

On my off-time, I tend to gravitate back to the kitchen because of my sheer love of cooking, baking and entertaining others. I’m an avid cookbook collector, passionate about knowing other cultures through their cuisine and fascinated by spice blends from around the world. My current project is to perfect a gluten-free sourdough bread and to learn Spanish.