From the outside, Surati’s Scarborough headquarters looks like just another suburban food plant: a beige brick building tucked between office parks, across from train tracks. But inside, the 83-year-old Indian snack company is quietly reinventing itself.
The store has always been a munchie paradise: a grocer with hundreds of its own line of biscuits, roasted chickpeas, chips, and frozen savoury snacks like samosas and kachori they make on the other side of the orange wall that separates the shop from the plant. But in recent months, the company has been testing a new idea: a vegetarian hot counter, thali lunches, and even tables and chairs for dine-in service. A restaurant is set to open inside the shop next spring, part of a slow transformation from snack manufacturer to dining destination.
It’s like if Lay’s or Voortman’s decided to open its own café — with a rotating thali menu and a three-generation backstory.
Shalini Sheth, the company COO and granddaughter of Surati’s co-founder, points to the bags of fried split pea and chickpea snacks under the company’s Shalini line, introduced 35 years ago when she was a teen. “That’s me. They named the value brand after me,” she laughs.
She and her brother, Mitesh, who works in the marketing department, are spearheading the company’s next steps: expanding into the casual dining space next April.
“It really started with the seniors who want something healthy and affordable,” says Shalini. “A lot of them can’t cook as often, including my mom who had knee surgery. We wanted a space where they can get fresh, reasonably-priced, home-cooked food every day.”
The current menu board is a preview of things to come. On one visit, the lunchtime thali consisted of undhiyu, Gujarati-style slow-cooked vegetables; daal (lentils); dum aloo (silky potatoes simmered in a tomato-based gravy); athanu (salty, sweet and sour pickles, also more widely known as achar); basmati rice; crispy fried wheat flour snacks called bhungra; and blistered chapati for $13. To finish, the shop also makes their own sweets like jalebi, a fermented flour batter fried into delicate webs. It’s crispy with a tart bite that makes it more complex than your standard fried dough snack.
“We’re Gujarati from Uganda, which is different from Indian Gujarati. If you ate something my grandma made from Kampala or something my mom made in Bombay, it’ll be different,” Shalini says. “Friday’s menu will be kidney beans and cassava, which is popular in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. On Thursday you’ll get khichdi, dal and rice, which is very Indian Gujrati. That’s my comfort food.”
While she officially joined the family business 12 years ago, Shalini remembers helping out with packing and labelling as a kid at the store (her now-husband remembers seeing her when he was shopping there as a kid, too). But her parents established a rule for her and her brother: they had to first work in other industries for a few years. She worked in cosmetics manufacturing (there’s a lot of parallels with food regulations, she says) while he did finance.
“It was so that it would be our choice if we wanted to work with (our family),” she says. “A family business doesn’t work if there’s an expectation that the kids would take over. Being able to make that choice is why we’re able to succeed. Even though the second generation (of owners) is here, we were able to do what we wanted but because we grew up with it, we know the traditions and to uphold them.”
The company dates back to 1942 in Kampala, Uganda, where in the late 1800s thousands of Indian laborers started construction on the British-owned railway system that stretched between the landlocked Uganda to the Kenya’s port city of Mombasa. Merchants from the Indian coastal state of Gujarat moved to Uganda to set up businesses catering to the new Indian diaspora. Among them were brothers Maganlal Sheth and Harilal Bhai who started making snacks and sweets. They named the new business after Surat, a major city in Gujarat.
“Everything was good through 1972 when all the Indians got kicked out of Uganda” says Haren Sheth, Maganlal’s son and the current CEO of Surati. Rising anti-Indian sentiment led to its then president Idi Amin announcing that Asians living in Uganda had to go. Tens of thousands left. The family was split up, moving to the UK, US and Canada. Maganlal’s other son, Mansukh Sheth, current president of Surati (and Shalini’s father), left Uganda and arrived in Toronto as a refugee that year and got a factory job. In 1980, Mansukh sponsored his parents and siblings to move to Canada.
“We came in the nice cold weather in February,” recalls Haren. “It was freezing and my dad didn’t know how to handle the snow and he felt like it was a prison being inside all the time. We said we’ll do something to keep him busy.”
Word spread among other Indians who resettled in the GTA that the people behind their nostalgic sweet shop in Kampala were also now in Toronto. Maganlal got to work in his home kitchen, preparing food for local Indian festivals, resulting in his sons setting up a 1200-square foot shop for him on Keele Street across from York University in August 1981. “That year, Surati officially became a Canadian company,” says Haren.
The wholesale business grew. Another one of Maganlal’s son, Yash Sheth, who resettled in Detroit, set up operations in America. A decade ago, the plant moved to its current location, which used to be a training facility for Honda technicians. It’s a massive, Costco-sized building (in fact, there are wooden palates of packaged snacks marked for the grocer as well as Loblaws, Sobeys, Metro and No Frills) with other shipments slated for San Jose, Chicago and as far as Sydney, Australia. There are separate, massive kitchens devoted to fried snacks and baked goods where thousands of pounds of cookies and lentil snacks are extruded, cooked and packed by a staff of 200 people. There’s hypnotizing conveyor belts of cookies and rotating ovens. Overhead, canola oil travel through a maze of pipes.
“We’re not the cheapest. The reality is that it’s more expensive to make things in Canada,” says Shalini, estimating that 80 per cent of the company’s products are made in this building. “But it’s part of our values to keep things here as much as possible. This country gave our family a chance when we came here.”
