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Mr. Kooks Inc.
10428 Vintage Dr
Keller, TX 76244
Telephone:
866-390-8396
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Website:
http://www.mrkooks.com
Year Started:
2006
# American Employees:
2
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We have been blending spices in India since 1912 and supplying world over.
U.S. was the only market that we could not enter but were monitoring this market. As the trend of spice consumption started changing in the year 1995 and Americans started to consume more and more spices, we decided to open up the U.S. market. After a thorough research and survey of over 3 years spreaded across the entire country, visiting lots and lots of retail chains – American and Indian, we came to the conclusion of starting with Indian Sauces.
We saw the availability of all ingredients in the United States except for spices and so we took our first major decision and that was to import the spices from India and get the products co-packed for us in the United States. We want to support the country where we live in and at the same time keeping our products authentic.
We first started sampling our products with Indian grocery stores in the California to ensure that the Indian community liked it and did that for 12 months, personally doing demo’s, keeping our kids at day cares and baby sitters to ensure we have first hand experience of the consumer.
Then came time to take the second most important decision. We decided to concentrate only with the main stream American Retail market as that was the real challenge and mission for us and till date we do not sell our products at any single Indian grocer, restaurants or wholesaler in the country. We thought that it would be important to concentrate with the mainstream market rather than have foot in both the markets. We first started selling with Ralphs in California and that is the time tragedy hit us. The first months the products were being placed and Southern California retailers went through a major strike, we had spent a lot of money to promote our product during that time and all went down the drain, it took almost 12 months for the market to come back to normalcy. It delayed our plans by a year. But then slowly and steadily gaining confidence we started expanding first within California.
It has been a slow process to cross the greatest hurdle we face and that was to break the myth of “INDIAN FOOD IS SPICY” and we are still educating our customers for this. We always joke we had to learn to drive on the left side of the road (India is right side) and so it was rebirth from scratch and it was back to school. Today Mr. Kook’s Natural Products are available in over 2000 main stream retail outlets (not a single Indian outlet) and the curries, sauces and marinades are manufactured in the U.S. Our Frozen Tandoori Nan and Frozen Vegetable Samosas are being imported from India as these products were not possible to be done in the U.S. due to the labor process. Our products are all “NATURAL” and we use the finest ingredient to ensure the true authenticity of “INDIAN FLAVOR”.
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Product Categories:
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Thoughts on America:
Loving, Friendly, and Helpful Human Beings. |
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