Hazuria produces high-quality cuisine

M. Taufiqurrahman, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

When people decide to start a business, what they have mind is a thriving company that will some day grow big and produce ever bigger profits.

However, there is one person who refuses to succumb to this and instead promotes values that could be deemed inappropriate for running a successful business: Her love of the product.

In the past 10 years, Molina Hazuria has resisted the temptation of seeing her company, which produces frozen home- cooked Indian food, grow into a big company, simply because of her love for the cuisine; she did not want the size of her company to interfere with the quality of its products.

To maintain the quality of her products, which range from Indian curry, tandoori chicken, vindaloo and kebabs, Hazuria has opted to keep her company small in size and catering to a small number of people, mostly from the middle to upper-income brackets.

"I want the food quality and the taste to remain good. If I supply it in bulk, maybe my quality will go down. I just want to keep the quality of my food high," she told The Jakarta Post during an interview at her leafy residence in Kemang, South Jakarta.

To maintain the quality of the food, her company -- which has only four cooks and a handful of domestic helpers -- delivers only limited supplies to the supermarkets that sell them.

"We cook the food in the morning and freeze it before supplying it to the supermarket. We send it to the supermarket, it's finished within three days and then we send new supplies. The turnover is very fast," she said.

All her products have been approved by the Ministry of Health and given halal certification by the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI).

Going against the conventional wisdom that incessant advertising will help companies sell their products, Hazuria has done just the opposite. "I don't advertise and use only word of mouth. People go to supermarkets to buy our products and if they like it, they will tell other people," she said.

Despite the absence of flashy advertisements on television or in newspapers, Hazuria's 35-item product range has become quite famous among expatriates in the capital and has expanded to reach other cities, such as Surakarta, Semarang, Bandung and Bali.

"However, there has also been a growing number of Indonesian customers," she said.

Molina describes her products as North Indian food, which are spicy and flavorsome rather than simply fiery. "It has the strong flavor of cloves, cinnamon and lentils," she said, adding that the cuisine differed from that served in the southern part of India.

North Indian cuisine is an eclectic fusion of influences from as far away as Persia and Greece, as the region was on the route traversed by invading countries.

Hazuria, who arrived in the country 24 years ago from Ferozepur, Punjab, North India, started her business in a modest manner. "My children went to an international school here and parents of their friends used to have lunch here. They liked my food and asked if I would agree to cater for their parties," she said.

Apart from food orders, expatriates also asked Molina to give cooking lessons on Indian food, which soon evolved into evening workshops.

Words of mouth recommendations spread and Hazuria started receiving invitations from a number of foreign and local companies asking her to serve as their food consultants.

One of her stints with a foreign company was when she was hired by a giant Australian food company to modify their "Continental" brand of pastas and rices to suit Indonesian tastes.

In 1995, she published a popular cookbook, A Taste of India, which also marked her foray into the catering business.

Cooking has dominated the greater part of Hazuria's life. Now 52, she started cooking at the age of 12, when she used to hang around her mother's kitchen.

When she started her business, she planned to supply her dishes to the international community in Jakarta: offering it to the Indian community here was the last thing on her mind.

"I never thought that I'd be catering to the Indian community. Indians generally cook good food at home themselves," she said.