The 4th edition of the Australian Macadamia Festival in Mumbai brought the nut’s distinctive flavour and culinary versatility to Mumbai’s vibrant food scene.
Festival highlights
01
La Panthera, BKC
Good food and great conversations
The festival kicked off at La Panthera, BKC, bringing together Mumbai’s culinary community.
02
The Quorum, Lower Parel
No longer a niche ingredient
At The Quorum, Lower Parel, our Application Solutions Guides showed industry leaders why macadamias are no longer a niche ingredient.
03
Live on stage
Saloni Kukreja & Yogesh Utekar
The acclaimed chefs highlighted the nut’s adaptiveness, crafting fresh macadamia pesto, gourmet cookies and inventive fusion dishes live on stage.
See what Chef Saloni Kukreja has to say about Australian Macadamia Festival
As part of the festival, you created a flavour with Australian macadamias. How did you find them to work with in the kitchen, and how did they hold up in ice cream in terms of texture, flavour and consistency?
We used the macadamia nuts in 2 different formats and they were extremely easy to work with. We roasted & chopped them as well as made a macadaima nut butter. Processing them especially the size 7 was a seamless process. It worked beautifully in the ice cream, both the flavour and the texture.
How did the macadamia flavour sell compared with the rest of your menu? Any figures you can share, such as units sold, sell-outs or price premium, would be great.
Customers in store were very intrigued by the flavour itself, the moment they tasted it most of them purchased it, either standalone or in our ice cream dessert format with a warm cookie. It was sold out the first weekend we launched it. It sold out again the following weekend. We have sold over 600 scoops in store and 120 matkas for delivery
What value did Australian macadamias bring to your menu, whether that’s premium positioning, new customers or repeat visits?
A lot of customers came back for the flavour, they brought along friends & family to try out the flavour as well. What we noticed is the origin of the nut immediately created a sense of premium-ness in the product and drew them towards trying it out.
What did you demonstrate at the trade event, what did chefs and buyers ask you most, and where else do you see macadamias fitting into Indian menus?
My demonstration was around the ASG guidelines, we chose the Macadamia cookie recipe and added a bit of a twist to it by adding caramelized white chocolate and a lemon cardamom drizzle. We saw macadamia in a bunch of different formats. It could be used in meat preparations, gravies, traditional sweets, pastry and ice cream
If a fellow chef or buyer asked whether to put Australian macadamias on their menu, what would you tell them?
Customers are always looking for something new and innovative to try, it would be a great addition to the menu. It’s definitely a differentiating factor and the geographical location of the nuts adds a extra layer of confidence in the consumer about the quality of the end product. It’s also very versatile and can be used in so many innovative ways. Nuts as a category is very well received and there is so much potential to create innovative products
~ Chef Saloni Kukreja
Founder – Indu Ice Cream
Australian macadamias have arrived on the Indian plate, and they are here to stay.
Moments from the festival
