Woman Quits IT Job To Sell Authentic Marathi Home Food, Now Owns 11 Restaurants

When Maharashtra native Jayanti Kathale travelled to Australia for work, she found that what she missed most was food from back home. She set out to search for an authentic desi restaurant to satisfy her cravings, but all she could manage was homemade food from Indian families in the area.

So when the software engineer returned to India, she decided she would cook and sell traditional Marathi cuisine on her own. She quit her job at Infosys to set up a small business to sell modaks.

Today, she is the founder of Purnabramha, which specialises in Marathi cuisine, and owns 11 restaurants across India and Australia. As much as 70 per cent of all her employees are women.

Purnabramha offers a wide range of true Marathi flavour — from the spice-laced misal pav to dal ka dulha, sabudana wada, sweet shrikhand puri and puran poli.

It took five years of research and experimenting for this 40-year-old to open her first outlet. “I was carrying a huge responsibility of representing my state. I wanted to tell people that our cuisine is beyond poha and vada pav. I wanted to be absolutely sure of every ingredient and process that I was going to use,” says Jayanti.

She now dreams of the day she is able to establish 5,000 restaurants across the globe.

Watch Jayanti’s awe-inspiring story here:

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