HR job to cheesemaker with global glory, meet this Mumbai woman PM praised

“The tweet from the Honourable Prime Minister is one of the greatest moments that my entire team and I will remember for our entire lifetime. It is a phenomenal recognition to have happened for an artisanal craft cheese maker in this country,” said Narang, 39, speaking from her Mulund office. Eleftheria has been winning at the World Cheese Awards since 2021, so international recognition is not new. But the scale of attention this time was different. “When I came back from my walk and saw my phone buzzing, that’s when I realised something had happened. I couldn’t have asked for anything better.”

The Mundial do Queijo do Brasil, now in its fourth edition, is a blind tasting competition that saw around 2,700 entries from approximately 30 countries, judged by 250 jurors. “Cheeses are split across tables, with three judges assessing each one on flavour, texture and visual appearance. The judges do not know where a cheese comes from. They score purely on merit,” she shared. Depending on the score, a cheese receives a bronze, silver, gold or super gold. Each table produces one super gold, which then goes forward to compete in the final 14 or 16, from which a world champion is selected.

Eleftheria won across three categories — a super gold for Gulmarg, a French Brie-style cheese; a gold for Brunost, a Norwegian-style whey cheese; and a silver for Kaali Miri, an aged cheese ball coated in Kerala black pepper, Himalayan pink salt and garlic. “The holy trinity of flavours that everybody in India would love,” said Narang of the Kaali Miri. The fourth medal, a gold for Yak Churpi (soft), went to Thenlay Nurboo of Nordic Farm in Leh, Ladakh, completing a remarkable debut for Indian cheese on this stage.

“The most beautiful thing about an international platform like this is that it puts Indian cheese on the global cheese map. We have been eating dairy products since time immemorial, but artisanal cheese getting its recognition and earning its seat at the table next to all the Western counterparts is truly phenomenal.”

The beginning

A little over a decade ago, none of this existed. It started with a craving and a sourdough loaf.

Narang had studied human resource management in the UK and worked for eight years in German and French conglomerates. She traveled extensively, lived in Germany for a period, and at 19 had her first Butterkäse, which is a German butter cheese. “That’s how it started. During my master’s in the UK, I would always have a block of cloth-bound cheddar in my fridge. Every week I tried different kinds of cheese. I felt like a kid in a candy store whenever I went to the supermarket there.”

Back in Mumbai, working at Capgemini, she started baking sourdough bread over weekends. Then she couldn’t find cheese to go with it. “I decided to make it myself. I thought, how difficult can it be? I discovered it was extremely difficult. The ingredients simply weren’t available here. I had to source them from outside the country.”

That was 2013, and what started as a weekend project quickly became an obsession. She tweaked the thermostat of the fridge in her room to 13 degrees Celsius, put a hygrometer inside to monitor relative humidity and began aging cheeses in it. At one point, she had 20 to 25 varieties aging in that single fridge. “My room really smelled because the cheeses had mould on them.” By 2015 she was working with 80 litres of milk in her mother’s kitchen. “I would not take holidays — I would make cheese instead.”

That same year, she quit her job. There were no cheese making schools in the country at the time, so she taught herself entirely through reading and trial and error. The philosophy that drove her was simple: “Cheese is milk’s leap towards immortality. Milk is such a fragile product and cheese is the best way to preserve it.” Her ambition was to make cheese as good as, if not better than, its Western counterparts, using local Maharashtrian milk, no preservatives, no artificial flavouring. “Just as a mother would make ghee or paneer at home. Our grandmothers used to collect makhan over days and the cultured makhan would become ghee. We have been eating fermented foods for a very long time. I just wanted to do the same with cheese.”

Building Eleftheria

She rented a small space and started Eleftheria with one helper. For the first six months, it was purely experimentation. Then she did farmers markets and pop-ups to understand how people were responding. In 2016 she began approaching boutique restaurants. Chef Kelvin Cheung (then leading Bastian’s kitchen) was among the first to try her cheese. Chef Alex Sanchez (then at The Table) was another early believer. “I sent him my burrata and said, please just try a sample. He had a lot of questions: how is this cheese made in Mumbai, where does the milk come from? But he tried it and said the cheese tasted amazing and placed an order. That was my first validation.”

Today Eleftheria has a team of 65 people and supplies to the HORECA segment across metros — the Oberoi Group, the Taj Group, and restaurants like O Pedro, The Bombay Canteen, CinCin, Americano and Otra, among many others.

The brand launched B2C during COVID, when it launched an online cheese shop offering pairings, cheese boards and grazing tables. “A lot of people told us they had tried our cheeses at restaurants and would love to try them at home but didn’t know what to pair them with. So we made it easy.” The timing coincided with the grazing table phenomenon taking off, and the boards became popular for gifting, hosting and entertaining. Since COVID, the brand has seen 30 percent year-on-year growth.

Eleftheria started with fresh varieties — fromage blanc, burrata, mozzarella. Kaali Miri was Narang’s first foray into aged cheese. Today the range runs to about 20 varieties.

Her best seller is the Brunost, a whey cheese inspired by Norwegian technique but made distinctly her own. “It tastes almost like a salted caramel milk fudge, toasty and caramelly, and is embossed with the Devanagari script initials of the brand. It resembles a kandi peda so much. Just as the peda makers used to stamp theirs, we decided to do the same.” People, she says, eat it grated on morning toast with berry jam, folded into cookies and cheesecakes, stirred into oats. The Kaali Miri — pepper, garlic, Himalayan pink salt — is the other consistent favourite. “Even my parents, who were apprehensive of the mouldy or unfamiliar cheeses, love this one. It appeals to the Indian palate.” Then there is Konark, a melty cheese for sandwiches and sourdough, and Gulmarg, the Brie-style that just won the super gold, best enjoyed on a board with crackers and honey.

When asked if artisanal cheese continues to be intimidating for people at large, she shares that internationally, cheese is an agro product. “Farmers made it as a way to preserve milk. The same instinct has always existed regionally in India, in Bandel, in Kaladi, in the pastoral cheeses of the northeast made by communities for whom it was simply intuitive. There is no reason for it to feel intimidating. But because we haven’t made cheese in the Western sense on a large scale here — beyond cheddar and mozzarella — there is a gap in awareness.”

Narang and her team’s approach on social media and in her messaging is deliberately demystifying. A cheese samosa. A halloumi taco thepla. Fromage blanc with thepla and koki at breakfast, the way her own parents eat it. “There is no need for fancy pairings, use what is already in your pantry.”