Story Of Deep Foods: Humble Beginnings

In the crowded American food industry, the story of Deep Foods stands out as a remarkable account of immigrant entrepreneurship that turned a home kitchen into one of North America's largest Indian food brands.

Deep Foods was founded in 1977 by Bhagwati Amin, a Gujarati homemaker in New Jersey whose homemade delicacies had become popular among neighborhood families and local grocers. To meet the growing demand, she and her husband Arvind — who quit his accounting job in 1981 to work full-time on the business — set up a factory in Lyndhurst, New Jersey. They named the company after their son, Deepak.

The company's first product was Hot Mix, a spicy trail mix of fried chickpea-flour noodles tossed with cashews, pistachios, and spices that the New York Times would later describe with admiration. From there the line grew: frozen meals, chutneys, spice blends, naan pizzas, and eventually ice cream.

What set Deep Foods apart was refusing the false choice between authenticity and ambition. The recipes stayed Gujarati and Indian at their core — no dumbing down for American palates — while the company invested in the food safety, packaging, and distribution infrastructure that let the brand escape the ethnic-grocery niche and land in mainstream supermarkets nationwide. Around 2009, the company launched Tandoor Chef, a frozen-food line designed explicitly to appeal to non-Indian customers.

As the Indian-American population grew, so did demand, and Deep Foods grew with it — three generations of the Amin family, with Deepak as CEO, running what became the largest US-based manufacturer of Indian foods, its products eventually reaching tens of thousands of stores.

Bhagwati Amin worked days in a clothing mill and cooked nights and weekends to feed the business in its early years. It is the classic immigrant arc — but with a detail worth noticing: she chose not to open a restaurant, the obvious move, because it would have taken her away from her family. The packaged-goods empire was, in a way, a family-first business decision that happened to change what America eats.