A small vegan cheese brand with a family’s well-being at the centre

The first time I sampled Millie’s vegan cheese, it was at a food market around 2014. The cheese was delicious with sundried tomatoes and chillies creating bursts of flavor in a tangy nut-based formulation.

It was an instant hit in my blended dietary household with even my dairy loving son grating it over his pasta and bowl meals. But post that experience, I found that it was hard to figure out where to reorder from. Now that I know more about Millie Mitra’s early distribution model, I understand why. At the time, she was still making small batches from her kitchen and selling them largely at famer’s markets and bazaars. 

When I eventually tracked her down, I sent my ever reliable driver on a 15 km drive from my end of town to Millie’s Benson Town location in Bangalore. He returned from the mission, looking slightly perplexed as he handed me the two inch round of cheese. But if he had any views on the strange errand, he kept it to himself. 

When I caught up with Millie more recently, I had to ask: why cheese? She had always been someone drawn to a natural way of living, she said – steering clear of makeup, nail polish and similar products, even as a teenager. But she had a weakness for cheese, even though the imported options available at the time were processed and overpriced. So, when she started her whole food plant-based journey as a new mother, cheese was something she felt driven to create alternatives for. 

When her first daughter was born, Millie said, she looked down at the tiny human in her arms and wondered how she could preserve that perfection. “It was a gift and I felt a lot of gratitude. But I asked myself – what can I do for her that aligns with nature.”

Influenced by the book ‘Fit for Life” by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond, Millie decided to adopt a whole food plant-based diet, focusing on eating food as close to its natural and unprocessed form as possible. A WFPB diet excludes animal products and emphasizes grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables. Even oils are avoided in favor of healthier fats such as seeds and nuts. 

As a Gujarati and a lifelong vegetarian, the shift wasn’t as extreme for Millie but it was initially a bit of a hard sell with her Bengali husband. He had already turned vegetarian soon after they married, and now, he complained, she was taking away the few things he could still enjoy.

Despite this, Millie forged ahead with the WFPB experiment, along with making other lifestyle adjustments to ensure that her daughters had the best start possible in life. She nursed both of her daughters till they were 4, for example. “It was 8 yrs of continuous breastfeeding”, she laughs. 

Though veganism and plant-based lifestyles are becoming more mainstream these days, it was a radical concept at the time that Millie was contemplating the shift in the early 90s. As she swapped out refined products for healthier options — red rice, millets, whole wheat flour and natural sweeteners – she faced plenty of pushback from friends and family who viewed her choices as extreme. 

Still, she persevered in her nutritional mission, convinced that it was the right thing for the family. It was during this period that she also started making a cashew-based spread to slather on bread and crackers. In 2012, when she had a chance to participate in the Hundred Hands market, she whipped up 20-25 bottles of the spread for the event. The response to it exceeded all her expectations.

Mille said: “There was a whole group of school kids, 8 or 10 years old, who came to the stall and sampled my products. And some of them declared that it tasted better than cheese.”

Yes, There’s a Right Way to Make Vegan Cheese

Buoyed by this validation, Millie continued to participate in small markets, using her home kitchen to whip up enough stock to meet the demand at each event.

She also began experimenting with making cheese wheels using cashews as the main ingredient. Determined not to compromise on ingredient quality, she stuck to using pink salt, and stayed away from stabilizers and preservatives to extend shelf life.

The cheese also undergoes a fermentation process for about four to six weeks, during which Millie monitors it closely to ensure no mold forms. Once it passes this stage, it can be refrigerated and stored for a relatively long time.

Millie says: “The cool thing about the cheese wheel is that it’s super stable because it’s made solely from cashews. The salt acts as a natural preservative.”

Finding Out Her Cheese Was the Real Deal

The turning point for her small homegrown venture was when she participated in the World on a Plate event in 2019. 

World on a Plate is a culinary organization that now operates its own restaurant in the Seshadripuram area of Bangalore. But in its early avatar, it was the primary organizer of a food festival series in the city, with the first one held in 2016. The festivals featured pop-up food stalls, masterclasses and competitions with celebrity chefs as judges. 

In 2019, when Millie participated in the event, one of the latter was Marco Pierre White, a British chef and television personality known for his intimidating presence and unfiltered food opinions. 

Millie said: ”I didn’t know it then but found out later that he was like a god in the culinary field – someone who’s even made Gordon Ramsay cry.”

At one point towards the end of the event, she saw a crowd forming around Marco. She stood in line to offer him a block of her cheese to try. She remembers feeling nervous as he cut a piece and popped it in his mouth. There were a few seconds of Masterchef-ish tension in the air before he looked at her and said: “That’s the best cheese I’ve had in India”.

From Passion Project to a Conscious Business

Marco’s endorsement got Millie to stop and think about what was next for her vegan cheese business. Until then, it had just been a passion project — something that combined her love for healthy food with the gap she saw in the market for tasty plant-based options. She had been able to pocket the proceeds without really considering her costs. “After all”, she laughed, “my husband took care of that part”.

But with the potential now on the table, Millie is starting to think about how she can take her venture to the next organic level, all while staying true to her ethos as a conscious food brand focused on small-batch production.

She says: “There’s a growing market and sensibility around eating plant-based. So now the effort is to bring in systems to make this more sustainable and to find out – are we breaking even and is it worth pursuing at scale? 

So she now has a manager to help her put these systems – such as financial trackers – in place, and a person who helps her with daily production. She’s dipping her toes into the online landscape by partnering with platforms such as Atmosphere, a health food site.

While the burnt chilli garlic and truffle oil flavors are the most popular varieties, she recently added a new one to the line-up. Methyano Masalo is Millie’s tribute to her Gujarati roots and is a pickle-flavored spread that tastes great on parathas and even dosas. She also has a classic mozzarella that can be used in pizza, lasagne and other classic cheesy dishes.

Relaxing Food Rules at Home

Over the years, Millie has realized that being militant about food at home doesn’t entirely work. At one point, she said, her desire to have the family eat the way that she felt was best was creating too much friction in the household. And so she learnt to let go and relax her rules, even giving up her own commitment to a WFPB diet at one point.

More recently, however, she and her husband have moved back to it as the diet that ultimately worked for them. But this time, she says, there is less dogma and more joy in being able to savor foods in their most unprocessed and natural forms. And, she says, they bend the rules to have the occasional pizza or samosa. Her daughters, now 32 and 28, have staked out their own positions along the vegan-vegetarian spectrum.

She says: “I was able to go back to being whole food plant based and do it in a much more friendly, rather than an imposing way.”

What has been the biggest reward for her in this journey? She stops to think and then responds that it’s when people sample one of her products and then tell her they can’t believe it’s not cheese. And so it makes sense that a variation of this phrase has become the tagline for Millie’s Vegan Cheese: I can’t believe it’s nut cheese.

You can order Millie’s Vegan Cheese products directly through her website; on Instagram @milliesvegancheese; or through Whatsapp at 919880273970. The products are also available on Atmosphere.