Our Story
Watch how the Quikfoods Team recreated authentic recipes with a focus on using simple ingredient and maximizing convenience.
Quikfoods Story - Founder’s Letter
I started Quikfoods to pursue my passion of creating products based on recipes of my childhood; recipes gently coaxed from my grandmother, mother, cousins and many a chef that I met during my travels. I learned to cook by helping in the kitchen using fresh ingredients. My mom did not believe in using processed foods. Everything was made at home using simple, fresh and easily understood ingredients. I wanted to recreate these recipes but reduce the time and effort required to enjoy them.
This is the basis of all our product creations.
We started with something that is served every day and all day in an Indian household – our flagship QuikTea® Chai latte. We continue the same time-tested principles; brewing the authentic recipes using natural flavors that take you back to your mother’s kitchen. Open a QuikTea® Chai Latte packet and it’s that same homemade taste again, but without any of the hassle!
The Foundation
The story of QuikTea began in 2001. I do not come from a family with traditions in Tea. My father was a doctor and my mother an economics graduate. We lived in Bombay (now, alas, Mumbai). When I was very young, half my right leg was burnt in a hot vessel of freshly made tea. So in a sense my connection with tea is a very real one. We moved to the USA when I was a teenager. After a successful stint in the IT world, I followed my dream to bring tea in an easy to use format to the Indian diaspora in the USA.
We made our tea using simple and easy to understand ingredients and ensured that the entire production cycle was ethically managed. We competed with giants such as Unilever and are immensely grateful to our customers who have made our products a success.
The Evolution
Over the course of the year it took me to finalize the recipes and ingredients for our Chai Tea Latte products, I travelled to many centers of excellence in spices, herbs and Tea gardens and ingredient manufacturers to source and better understand the world of tea. We met with Master blenders at the renowned J Thomas company in Calcutta who helped in formulating our teabags and organic tea. We also travelled to magical Kerala to meet with spice farmers and extraction companies to create a blend of extracts for our Chai Tea Latte needs. We also worked with a coconut milk powder company to remove additional oils from the powder to reduce the “coconut” odor in our teas.
It has been a fun journey and involved meeting a passionate group of people who are really committed to the products they make. They are the main reason that we can provide you great products with simple and easy to understand ingredients.
The Passion
The Process
Our teas are processed, blended & packaged before shipping at our state-of-the-art, SQF Level 2 certified manufacturing facilities in Maharashtra, India.
We adhere to the highest quality and food safety standards, maintaining sustainable manufacturing practices while supporting local economies at every stage of production.
The Recognition
ECRM is America’s leading platform that brings together buyers and sellers
across several industries including food & beverage
The Promise
colors or artificial flavors. Enjoy the QuikTea taste and convenience
without any compromise.
Ashish Shah | CEO and Founder
Ashish is currently responsible for all the QuikTea blends, product development and manufacturing. Ashish has always been successful at knowing what the customer wants. He started his career with Compuware Frontiers, then founded Lansend, MyIndia.com and Internet Resources, selling all 3 companies.
Since 2003 Ashish has been passionately curating a line of QuikTea blends, creating a new category of “On The Go” Instant Chai Latte in the US. He lives with his wife and 2 children in New Jersey.
Sriram Iyer | Chairman
Ever since he fell in love with QuikTea, Sriram has invested in and provided active management help to Quikfoods. He is an entrepreneur with over 25 years of executive management, sales and marketing experience in Europe, the US, and India. Sriram co- founded and sold Second Foundation. He invests in diverse ventures and provides them with strategic direction. Sriram has also consulted for companies like DHL, Citibank and tech start‐ups.
Sriram holds an engineering degree in manufacturing and an MBA in International Business.