Why The Saffron Tree's Monalisa Fathima has something to smile about

A single mother, Monalisa moved to Leeds when her son was just five years old, alone and she didn’t know a soul. “I wanted to move to the UK but I didn’t know anyone and I had never travelled outside of India. I decided to come to Yorkshire because I am quite religious and I heard it was called God’s Own Country and so I settled here.”

Monalisa settled her young son, Aman Joshua, into a school in Leeds where she volunteered as a teaching assistant to be close to him. “The school seemed to like me and offered me a permanent job after four months,” she says.

Finding a new enjoyment in education, she decided to enrol at the University of Leeds to do a Masters in Education. “My plan was to get a teaching degree so that I could become a teacher. But then I was given the chance to do a full- time PhD in Education, in which I encouraged and analysed the development of young people’s interpersonal learning through a context that I knew and loved so well… cooking practices. I couldn’t really believe it, I was never all that academic at school in India and I could just imagine the faces of my teachers in Hyderabad if I told them I was doing a PhD.”

The “plan” was to put the findings of her research into practice by setting up a cookery school. “It would mean doing the two things that I so dearly loved: working with food and working with people,” says Monalisa.

However, shortly after completing her doctorate in 2018 she started to suffer with her vision. “I was diagnosed with congenital cataracts. My grandmother suffered from them and refused to have an operation and so lost her sight – that scared me and so I was determined to have surgery.”

Post-surgery, Monalisa was unable to put any pressure on her eye, which meant trying to keep her head as still as possible. “It meant I couldn’t cook for at least six weeks. And so me and my son had to rely on supermarket ready meals.”

It was this forced reliance on what the supermarkets had to offer by way of Indian chilled meals that gave Monalisa the idea for a new business. “I couldn’t work out why we couldn’t get any decent authentic Indian ready meals. You can make them at home and get them in a restaurant but why not as a ready meal? I saw a massive gap in the market.”

Using research and analysis skills from her PhD, she set about making, testing and creating a range of prepared chilled meals. “I set up focus groups to test the meals which were all the things I like to cook and eat and I also put a call out to the people of Harrogate where I live to ask them if they wanted me to cook for dinner parties for free if they bought the ingredients and filled out a questionnaire – I ended up doing about 60 or 70 dinner parties.”

The result was the Saffron Tree – named after the magical tree her grandmother used to tell stories about when she was a little girl. “It was really a business born out of frustration,” she admits.

Saffron Tree’s authentic range of Indian food is based on a collection of classic dishes passed down from Monalisa’s family and friends. She approached Harrogate Council and it helped her find a suitable unit on the outskirts of the town to start her food production business. “I didn’t know anything about food production or retail for that matter, so it was a steep learning curve.”

You might have thought that with restaurants closed and people stuck at home during the various lockdowns, demand for ready meals would go up. But that wasn’t the case.

“People who might have wanted a ready meal for convenience when they were working suddenly had more time – they were cooking and baking at home. Virtually overnight the number of shops stocking my meals went from 15 to four. I had invested everything in the business and it was a really worrying time and I wasn’t sure how we were going to survive,” says Monalisa.

She realised that if more people were cooking at home, she could supply everything they needed – with the addition of meat or vegetables – to create an authentic Indian meal. And so the Saffron Tree range of blends, rice and naans was created, all in beautifully packaged tins.

“Our blends have more than eight spices in them so rather than people having to buy lots of different spices they can just use one tin of Saffron Tree spice blend to make their authentic Indian meal – it’s like an Indian meal kit.” There are recipes on the tins but also on the Saffron Tree website.

The idea took off, so much so that Monalisa won the Grocer New Product Award. It was then that she got a call from a production company for the BBC saying the Hairy Bikers wanted to come and cook and film with her for their new programme, The Hairy Bikers Go North. “I have to admit that I had never heard of them, which in some ways was a good thing as I wasn’t all that nervous, although I really don’t like being in front of the camera.”

It was only after the show went out that Monalisa realised just how important that visit had been – and it helped change the direction of her firm. “It was filmed in June but didn’t come out until September 2021. Before it came out we had been really struggling, but then I got a phone call from Waitrose asking if they could stock my chilled meals. I couldn’t believe it. We had been really struggling and then suddenly this supermarket chain was asking if they could stock my meals.”

It meant the Saffron Tree suddenly found itself having to upscale production massively. Monalisa also had to take on more staff and make her production more automated to keep up with the volumes. “We are a small company who do everything by hand but suddenly we were making five to six thousand meals a week.”

Then the Hairy Bikers programme came out and demand for her blends went through the roof. “After the show aired, we sold 40,000 tins. We just couldn’t keep up with demand. We had to shut the online shop so that we could keep up with the mail order side. Then we’d open the online shop again and have to close it again. We just weren’t geared up for that sort of demand. We had to learn quickly. We have customers as far afield as Australia.”

The success of her spice blends left Monalisa with a dilemma. “To keep the ready meal side for Waitrose and the Together blends it would have meant outsourcing and I really didn’t want to do that. The quality is what is important to me and to keep the quality I need to keep control.”

That forced her to take the difficult decision to suspend manufacture of her ready meals and supplying Waitrose for the time being.

“I’m not saying we have stopped doing them forever but I need to take some time to take stock of where we are as a company and where we want to be. We supplied Waitrose for six months and it was a very difficult decision to make but I am learning all the time and I had to decide what was best for me and best for the business and ultimately for the customer.

“When I look back to when I came to the UK, a single mum with a little boy who is now 18, and see what I have achieved, it makes me very proud.”

saffrontree.co.uk