Karri Kitchen sees 2022 end with a £450,000 deal with the Cork-based Musgrave Group

A string of business successes in 2022 has led to Karri Kitchen developing into a small company to watch especiallly in the year ahead.

The ambitious couple own Karri Kitchen in Portadown, a small food manufacturing enterprise, which saw 2022 end with a substantial boost in the shape of a £450,000 deal with the Cork-based Musgrave Group that’s seen the company’s healthy and nutritious meals on the shelves of the group’s extensive network of grocery stores across Northern Ireland.

The delicious meals, which include its multi-award winning mango chicken curry, are also available to pre-order from its well-stocked factory shop in the Co Armagh market town. Other dishes include Thai chicken curry, Indonesian chicken noodles and sweet and sour tempura chicken. New products include healthy overnight oats.

All the original recipes have been created by Shera and are produced in the plant at Carn.

The business has also supplied Aldi-Ireland for its acclaimed Grow with Aldi short-term support for artisan and smaller food producers.

Another business boost at the end of the year was the achievement of Safe and Local Supplier Approval (SALSA), an influential food-safety accreditation.

“SALSA certification is only granted to food suppliers who are able to show an auditor that they are able to produce food legally and safely and that they are committed to continually meeting the required SALSA standard,” Shera explains.

“It’s an official endorsement of the quality, taste and safety of all our meals."

Shera, originally from Indonesia, says the business is emphasising the healthy and nutritious features of its products for the longstanding trend of consumers seeking a healthier start to the New Year.

She hopes consumers will carry this interest beyond the early months of 2023 by “setting health goals for the whole year, aiming for small wins”.

A fitness enthusiast, Shera urges: “Let’s adopt health goals that can help us break bad habits and establish good ones. Let’s focus on better health which can improve our relationship with foods and how we feel about ourselves, among other things.

“A health goal can be as simple as dedicating a daily decision, swapping ingredients on your weekly groceries for healthier alternatives, or aiming for seven or eight hours of sleep. Eating multiple servings of vegetables each day is essential to enjoying a healthy and balanced lifestyle, but few people know that this is also a key part in forming an anti-inflammatory diet."

She picks out two vegetables that could form part of a healthy diet. “Broccoli, for example, is actually a winter vegetable due to its ability to thrive in the cold weather.

“It contains bioactive sulphur compounds called glucosinolates that minimise the risk of disease by decreasing inflammation. Sweet potato has an impressive carotenoid content. Carotenoids (like beta carotene) protect cells from free radical damage that could cause inflammation.”

The enterprising couple, who have a five-year-old son, met in Sydney, Australia, where Shera had been studying and working in hospitality. Chris, a successful Portadown businessman, was visiting the country.

They started Karri Kitchen soon after setting up home together in Portadown.

“We started Karri Kitchen in 2019 in NI, having moved from Sydney in 2017 where I had lived and worked for eight years,” she continues.

Karri Kitchen is a reflection of her Indonesian heritage, “a rich and varied experience in the food industry, as well as my great passion for healthy and nutritious food”.

Hospitality and clean healthy eating had always been part of her life, how she was raised, her family’s lifestyle, and part of her work experience.

A believer in what she describes as “intuitive eating” which she describes as “listening to your body and trusting instincts to make choices around fresh and nutritious food, without judgment and influence from a ‘dieting’ culture”.

“We have all been born with not only with the desire and necessity to eat, but also with the instinctive skills to stop when we are full, to eat when we are hungry, to distinguish different tastes and what we like and don’t like, and to eat satisfying foods. I have brought all of this together in each Karri Kitchen meal. Offering South-East Asian cuisine in the comfort of a consumer’s own home,” she adds.