“Women need not choose between following their passion and having children”

On a mission to help break down the boundaries of cooking different cuisines and trialling new ingredients, FeastBox and Red Rickshaw Founder and CEO Jyoti Patel, speaks to us on this International Women’s Day. Growing up in a large Indian family, life naturally revolved around the kitchen but the mother of two, now, through her innovative business, is ensuring women can have the best of both worlds- career, passion and family.
More than just a recipe box, her brand FeastBox is making a promise to its customers – to always bring something new. From unique and authentic ingredients (sourced by the brand’s sister company Red Rickshaw) to a constantly refreshed recipe repertoire; home chefs are guaranteed to impress themselves with new skills to create restaurant quality meals from the comfort of their own kitchen.
During the pandemic, many started delivering Indian groceries like you do through Red Rickshaw. What makes Red Rickshaw different from the newbies?
During lockdown, when many communities were cut-off from their source of ingredients, we expanded our global offering to include ingredients for African, Thai and Chinese cuisines, and are continuing to build out more.
What sets Red Rickshaw aside from other competitors is that we source authentic and breath-taking in-season ingredients for a wide range of cuisines. By bringing the world's best seasonal produce to the people of the UK and beyond, we want to help the food industry and foodies embrace the world’s biodiversity and balance the world’s diet, so that it isn’t so weighted towards unsustainable animal farming and high-yield, low-nutrition cash crops.
Most importantly, we look after our customers. Buying online, especially fresh fruit and vegetables can sometimes be a daunting experience. However, we take every care to ensure we only send the very best quality produce, as we know too well the quality of the ingredients matters.
Red Rickshaw also takes the time to answer any consumer questions about how they might implement worldly ingredients, like banana flower or amchoor powder, into exciting new dishes.
How did you think of the FeastBox idea?
Once Red Rickshaw had flourished into a hugely successful online retailer for world ingredients, I launched FeastBox, the world food recipe box, to educate and guide customers on how to authentically use these exciting ingredients within everyday cooking.
After growing up using many flavoursome ingredients when cooking with my grandmother, I wanted to inspire home cooks to bring flavoursome ingredients, adventure, and discovery back to their cooking.
Through the recipe boxes, I hoped to help people connect to the places they dream of visiting, the experiences they love to reminisce about, and embrace different cultures through food.
Each recipe box is delivered directly to homes with the exact amount of ingredients required, alongside weeknight-friendly, step-by-step recipe cards ensuring a quality home dining experience full of flavour. We aim to break down the challenges our customer’s face when cooking with unique, global ingredients by teaching expert cooking methods within the carefully crafted recipes.
The Sharing Boxes allow customers to create the ultimate at home dining experience with their families and friends. With recipes from Korea, Mexico, India, Japan, and more, these sharing boxes feed between 4 and 6 people and are a great way for our customers to come together and connect with their loved ones through the joy of food.”
Do you plan to do a vegetarian or vegan only FeastBox for clients?
We have a varied selection of vegan and vegetarian recipe options to choose from every week, with a guarantee of four vegan recipes at minimum. We also have vegetarian and vegan sharing boxes available.
We are always looking to increase the number of vegan and vegetarian options on FeastBox during any given week, but we like to cater to all customers’ needs and wants and therefore we wouldn’t look to exclude certain food groups for an extended period.
We’re passionate about plant-based eating, and we apply the same standards of authenticity and full flavour to our vegan meals as we do to all our others. As a world food recipe box, part of our mission is to show our customers that veganism isn’t a flash-in-the-pan trend, it’s an ethos that has been followed in many forms all over the world for centuries.
Our recipes show off the versatility of plant-based ingredients like tofu, jackfruit, and lentils, which deserve to be enjoyed, not just as ‘meat substitutes’.
What’s next for you as a business and woman entrepreneur?
As we look forward, we’re excited to explore new avenues for the business in line with growing consumer demands. I’m particularly excited about FeastBox’s recent venture into the ready-meal market, as I believe our ability to add a sense of convenience to high-end, quality dining will bring a new, exciting dimension to the business.
We’ve also recently rebranded FeastBox, to create a joyful brand personality, full of colour, that builds excitement early so consumers can see how great we are before they even try our food.
What’s more, Red Rickshaw’s move from predominantly Indian produce and flavours to a new, wider focus on hard-to-find ingredients from across the world is something that also excites me, and it’s our aim to widen our global offering even further over the coming years.
I really hope through FeastBox and Red Rickshaw that I’ve bought joy and adventure back to household cooking, and that I’ve shown women around the world they don’t have to choose between following their passion (which in my case was an insatiable curiosity with trying new foods and developing a career around that) and having children.