Sneaking South Asian soul into every snack aisle
Curry Smugglers is rewriting the story of South Asian snacks, one pakora at a time. Founders Ruby and Steve aren’t just selling food; they’re bottling childhood rituals, family kitchen chaos, and the unmistakable swagger of a culture that’s as heartfelt as it is hilarious. In this conversation, they share the real stories behind their name, the flavours they refuse to dilute, and the challenges of scaling recipes without losing their soul. This is nostalgia with modern swagger and a reminder that sometimes the best ideas are the ones you smuggle home in your suitcase.
What were your earliest memories of desi snacks?
Curry Smugglers is such a bold name! What’s the story behind it?
For both of us, desi snacks were just life, not a separate food group, not something saved for special occasions, but woven into everyday rituals. Our earliest memories aren’t of opening a shop-bought packet, they’re of moments. Ruby remembers her mum frying pakoras with the back door wide open so the house didn’t fill with steam. Steve remembers the same chakli tin appearing every Diwali, except it wasn’t a chakli tin, it was an old Quality Street box full of perfectly crisp spirals, lovingly rationed so it didn’t disappear in one go.
There was always a tub of Bombay mix somewhere.
At weddings, parties, family functions, it was the snack you snuck into your palm while pretending to help set the table. And there was no such thing as a ‘serving size’. Just a handful here, a pinch there, all the while being told “Bas, don’t spoil your appetite!” These snacks are part of our cultural fabric. When we make them now, it’s not just about flavour, it’s about bottling that whole world and passing it on.
We knew from day one we didn’t want to blend in. Curry Smugglers had to feel cheeky like a wink across the departure lounge. The name actually came out of a real moment: we were coming back from India, bags overloaded with snacks and spice packets, and a customs officer at Heathrow looked at our suitcase, raised an eyebrow and said, “What’s in here then… curry?”
We laughed, but it hit us, this was the experience of so many
families like ours.
Our mums, aunties and uncles did smuggle food, achar wrapped in cling film, mithai boxes sealed in layers of tape, chakli packed into old biscuit tins. It was love in luggage form. And we wanted to celebrate that. So no, we’re not literal smugglers but we are smuggling something just as bold: the soul of South Asian food culture into places it’s been missing for too long. Onto supermarket shelves, into craft snack boxes, into people’s lives in a way that’s modern, exciting, and full of flavour.
How big is the team currently?
Right now, it’s the two of us, Steve and Ruby, at the core, doing everything from product development to brand partnerships, order packing to investor meetings. We’re the kind of startup where one minute you’re writing a pitch deck and the next you’re doing a late-night taste test in the kitchen with spice-stained fingers. That’s the reality of building something from scratch.
But we’re not alone. We’ve built a circle of talented freelancers and collaborators who support us in design, marketing, logistics, manufacturing and more. We operate like a desi kitchen, small, intense, but full of magic. And we’re building in a way that allows us to grow sustainably, with people who believe in the mission as much as we do.
Can you explain the idea behind your packaging?
The packaging was never an afterthought. In fact, it started as the problem we had to solve. We’d walk down snack aisles and see amazing South Asian snacks trapped in dull, noisy plastic bags with clunky fonts and outdated visuals. The food inside? Legendary. But the outside didn’t reflect the culture, the energy, or the story.
So we reimagined everything. Our snacks come in cans, not because it’s quirky for the sake of being quirky but because it breaks the category. It stops people in their tracks. It flips the idea of what desi snacks can look like. The cans are bold, colourful, and proudly different. But they’re also functional, recyclable, resealable, and perfect for gifting or stashing in a work drawer. We want people to see a Curry Smugglers can on the shelf and think: I’ve never seen desi food celebrated like this before.
How do you strike the balance between nostalgia and modernity in both your branding and your flavours?
That balance is the heartbeat of everything we do. We’ve grown up with these flavours, they’re encoded into our childhoods. But we also live in a modern, multicultural, design-savvy world. So the question we always ask is: how do we honour the past without getting stuck in it?
On the flavour side, we keep the soul of the recipes intact. We don’t mess with what makes them great, we just refine the techniques, elevate the ingredients, and make sure they taste consistently banging whether you’re eating them at a house party or from a corporate snack box. The pakora, for example, is still our mum’s recipe. But now it’s baked and sealed with care to retain that fresh-from-the-kitchen crunch.
On the brand side, we draw from everything we grew up with: Bollywood posters, garage flyers, aunties in bindis and sunglasses, that playful, chaotic, heartfelt desi energy. Then we remix it with bold typography, clean design, and clever storytelling. It’s not retro for the sake of it, it's a cultural memory with a modern swagger.
Which snack in your range feels the most personal to you, and why?
What has been the most unexpected challenge in turning a kitchen idea into a retail-ready product?
It has to be the Pakora. There’s a reason it was the first product we perfected. This is our mum’s recipe, full stop. No tweaks. No trend-chasing. Just what she made for us growing up, from scratch, every time she wanted to show love without saying it out loud.
The oil heating on the stove, the chopping of onions, the smell of ajwain seeds, the way she’d fry them in small batches and warn us to wait for them to cool (we never did). It’s a snack tied to weather, to emotion, to comfort. And now it’s out in the world, in cans, being eaten by people who’ve never heard of ajwain but say, “These are addictive!”
Honestly? How unforgiving the food industry can be when you’re trying to do things properly and differently. When you’re making pakoras at home, a bit of extra moisture or a longer fry time doesn’t matter. But when you’re scaling that recipe to thousands of units, suddenly every detail is critical. Shelf life, water activity, packaging compatibility, transport durability, none of this stuff is visible to the customer, but it can break your business if you get it wrong.
We had to learn the hard way that what works in your mum’s kitchen doesn’t automatically work in a commercial kitchen. Every small change, a new supplier, a longer courier route, a change in weather, can affect the final product. And then there’s compliance, testing, traceability, and a thousand other things we never thought we’d be experts in.
But perhaps the biggest challenge has been holding the line on flavour and identity. There’s constant pressure to dilute things, to make it more “neutral” or “palatable.” But we refuse. If it doesn’t taste like home, if it doesn’t carry the emotional punch of the original, we won’t put it in a can. That’s non-negotiable. The challenge is making a product that feels authentic and personal at scale, in a system that often prioritises sameness. That’s the hard bit. But it’s also why we’re here.
What role does storytelling play in your branding?
Storytelling is the brand. Without it, we’re just a snack in a nice can. But with it, we become something more, something that speaks to identity, memory, and community. We grew up in Britain where our food was often misunderstood, mocked, or reduced to stereotypes. So now, through Curry Smugglers, we’re telling a different story, one that celebrates the richness, the humour, and the everyday brilliance of South Asian culture.
Every product we launch starts with a story. The Chakli isn’t just a crunchy snack, it’s the ritual of Diwali prep, the clang of a tin opening, the scent of frying flour. The Bombay Mix is our nod to road trip pit stops, late-night leftovers, and that one cousin who eats all the cashews first. These stories live on our packaging, our website, our socials, and even in our investor decks.
As first-generation founders, what’s one lesson you learned the hard way that you wish someone had told you sooner?
What is your idea of success?
That there’s no perfect moment to start. Like many first-generation kids, we were raised to be cautious, to make things bulletproof before showing them to the world. But entrepreneurship rewards momentum, not perfection. We wish someone had said: launch messy, learn fast, keep going.
We also had to unlearn the idea that being different was a disadvantage. For a while, we worried we didn’t look or sound like “professional” founders. But our background, our cultural knowledge, taste memories, and lived experience is our unfair advantage. Now we’re building a business that looks like us, sounds like us, and reflects our community. We trust our gut, ask for help, and show up fully. If we’d known that sooner, we’d have spent less time second-guessing and more time scaling.
For us, success isn’t just a line on a graph or a revenue milestone, although we care deeply about building something sustainable. True success is cultural and emotional. It’s someone walking into a shop, spotting our can on the shelf, and feeling seen.
We want to be the brand that proudly represents a new generation of South Asians, kids who grew up eating chakli but now work in Soho; aunties who still make pakoras from scratch but are thrilled to see them in a can; non-desi snack lovers who discover our range and get hooked.
If we can be part of your life in that way, on your coffee table, in your lunchbox, in your Diwali hampers, we’re already succeeding. And if we can open doors for more desi-owned food brands to get the space, respect, and design love they deserve? That’s legacy.
Success is being able to say: we did this our way, and we did it with flavour, soul, and Desi swagger.