Hungry? Yearning to slather mayonnaise on puffed bun? Looking for low-cholesterol, low-fat, absolutely vegetarian mayo? Did you pick Cremica Veg Mayo, the original vegetarian mayonnaise, off the shelf? Wait. Ever gave the mayo a thought? Where it all began?

Forget the machine that whirrs together the ingredients. Instead, think of a dainty, porcelain-skinned Chief Taste Officer, her almond eyes rimmed with kohl, diamond gleaming on her ring finger, her eyebrows arched, her cheeks rouged damask, talking of food as monks talk of salvation.

Meet Geeta Bector, Chief Taste Officer of Mrs Bector’s Cremica Foods — a Rs 561-crore, 2,500-employee company. Imagine the petite home-science graduate (and an almost-there fashion designer) standing in her modern laboratory in Phillaur (Jallandhar district, Punjab) measuring each spice to the last nanogram, tasting, innovating, improvising the perfect recipe for the sauces, syrups, chutneys, dressings that have made the company one of the largest players in Indian food services industry.

Often she gets the recipe right. Often, in the process, the aroma of pepper and cinnamon stubbornly sticks to her skin. Geeta concedes it is tough to wash that aroma off the skin, but such is her love for food innovation that if the recipe turns out perfect, she happily embraces the heady trail of pepper smell. This, perhaps, also explains why she holds the Chief Taste Officer tag closer to heart than that of the company President.

The story of Cremica, however, began with another Mrs Bector. Nearly three decades ago, an enterprising Rajni Bector sold handmade ice-cream from the backyard of her Jalandhar home. The company derived its name from Rajni’s rich, creamy ice-creams. The name and reputation stuck.

From ice cream and baked goodies from the backyard, the company leaped to a bread plant. A move that changed the company’s fortunes and the parameters of Indian food industry. Today, with one factory in Phillaur and two more in the pipeline, the company has India’s largest tomato ketchup line and is its largest producer of ketchup portion packs with capacity to pack 2.5 million sachets a day.

Besides McDonald’s, the company is a major supplier to Indian Railways, Big Bazaar, Pizza Hut, Cafe Coffee Day, Barista, Papa John’s, the United Nations (World Food Programme) and Jet Airways, among others.

Nearly two decades ago, when Cremica was rustling up bigger, better ‘food’ plans, a Delhi undergrad girl set aside her chance to go to New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, paid heed to her parents’ “you must get married now” decree and became Mrs Bector.

“Entrepreneurship was part of the family DNA, dreams borrowed from Barbara Taylor Bradford’s Woman of Substance , and food is a genetic love,” says Geeta, sitting in her plush New Delhi home, with Czar, the Husky, playing at her feet. Always a foodie, she took the company on a different taste trajectory — creating imli (tamarind) and mint chutney, vegetarian burgers and curry bread for McDonald’s. And the famous Veg Mayo and Pickle Tickle bread spread.

For Geeta, inspiration is everywhere. Even 35,000 ft amidst fluffy clouds, in the mustard-y salad dressing of an airline food! She often carries home the taste — it helps that she is good at ‘duplicating’. That is how she describes herself. Ask her to describe the two-decade-old culinary journey and she immediately pulls an analogy out of Venice — “it has been a gondola ride”.

A Sagittarian, she takes the bumps in her stride, never categorises her work into “easy” and “difficult”, and certainly does not want to retire. Food is her axis and she does not want her life to revolve around anything else. When she is not rustling up salads in her kitchen, she sits by the fireplace and reads. She has veered towards Buddhism, chanting every morning and evening — a habit that helps her maintain “inner and outer balance”. Her eyes gleam with fulfilment; she’d never want to rewrite her life, never walk another path.

Picture by the author

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