Thane is witness to a new delivery kitchen–Vegan Asmi–founded by Upasana Chakraborty. Upasana has worked with The Vegan School, Singapore, for a couple of years where she was also the recipe developer. She said Vegan Asmi is a “fully vegan cafe at affordable prices offering global cuisines, weekly specials with flavors so good that one won’t believe it’s vegan!”
After staying in Singapore for 9 years, she moved to Mumbai at the end of 2019 and founded a Vegan Diwali Sweet Box Limited edition pop up last year. “The vegan food scene is still developing in India and whatever options are available at highly priced. Efforts need to be made to provide easily accessible vegan food which is at par in terms of price, flavour and quality. This cafe is my part of effort”, said Upasana. She added, “My passion project is self-funded. As we grow, we aspire to hire a sit-down cafe space. For that, we would look for investment/loans or funding, as our model is scalable and would like to open branches.”
Challenges for now are mainly to convince people to try. But as per current reviews, I think once anyone tries something from our menu, they are hooked and we have very fast developed some repeat order and patronages. Currently, Vegan Asmi is delivering to Thane and areas Kandivali, Borivali, Mulund and Vikhroli. “We are new so we are still working on the delivery part,” she said.
Asmi simply means ‘Being’, hence, Vegan Asmi means ‘Being Vegan’. She continued, “My experience says that is very easy to turn and stay vegan. The menu is also designed in such a way that people can identify and easily connect with. When asked about how she became vegan, Upasana said, “I have always been vegetarian. But in 2013, I developed allergy to ghee and butter. So I eliminated these two, and gradually the shift to plant-based foods came along. But the complete transition came when I myself became a mother. I couldn’t imagine stealing another mother’s milk just because it’s an animal and can’t speak for itself. My kid has always been fed plant-based milks,” she said before signing off.
