Sumeet Saigal rose to fame in 2024 when she competed on MasterChef Australia. The Punjabi cook from NSW resigned from her job as a sales manager in order to appear on the popular cooking show. Two years later, she’s released her own range of Indian simmer sauces called Masala Makers.
Since moving to Australia from India when she was 21, Sumeet has has enjoyed seeing the evolution of the Indian food scene in Australia – complete with challenges and opportunities. In this special piece she’s written for ‘Draw Your Box’, Sumeet explains how her new sauce venture was equally shaped by these experiences and her prior upbringing in India, as it was by her MasterChef experience.
People ask me what it feels like to finally see Masala Makers sitting on supermarket shelves.
The honest answer? It’s incredibly humbling.
When someone picks up one of my jars, they don’t just see a simmer sauce. They see years of dreaming, conversations with chefs and food technologists, countless days in my kitchen, months of recipe development, endless packaging revisions, late nights buried in spreadsheets trying to understand every commercial variable, innumerable taste tests, moments of triumph, tears, self-doubt and, above all, patience, faith and grit. This dream didn’t begin after MasterChef. It began decades earlier. The vision was crystal clear from the start. It was a deep knowing. It was simply a matter of time before it found its expression in a jar.
I grew up in Bangalore in a family where food wasn’t just something we ate – it was how we connected. The dining table was where stories were told, debates were had, and recipes were passed from one generation to the next. We didn’t just talk about whether something tasted good; we talked about where ingredients came from, how spices travelled across continents, why one family made a dish differently from another and what history sat behind every meal.
Those conversations shaped the way I think about food today.
Although I spent many years building a career in the corporate world, food never stopped calling me. It was always the creative outlet I came back to. It was my calm, my zen.
MasterChef certainly changed my life. It was the pivotal point when I made the segue and took the leap of faith into living out my passion. It gave me a platform like no other. It introduced me to an incredible community and reminded me that there was space for my voice and my food.
With Masala Makers, I didn’t want to create another curry sauce. I wanted to create products that gave people confidence. Confidence to cook with Indian flavours. Confidence to experiment. Confidence to make the recipes their own.
Products that could introduce bold Indian flavours into the meals Australians are already cooking every week – whether that’s a pasta bake, a tray bake, a soup, a roast or a traditional curry. I believe Indian flavours don’t belong in a separate category. They belong in everyday cooking.
India is a country that has embraced foods from other cultures for centuries before fusion food was ever a thing. The Mughals, the Dutch, the French, the Portuguese, Alexander the Great’s conquests, trade with the Syrian Christians, the British, and so many more bordering nations have influenced the foods of India. India embraced them all and made them uniquely its own.
One thing I’ve noticed after living in Australia for more than half my life is how we look at Indian food as one curry night a week or something that we eat occasionally. More so, because the legacy flavours that we have access to here do not lend themselves to everyday eating. Indian flavours truly are so versatile and can be incorporated into everyday meals. It is, after all, the daily food of over 1 billion people in the world all year round.
When I was developing my range, I had to be very mindful that every ingredient had to earn its place. Every recipe had to be authentic without being complicated. Every jar had to reflect the quality of what was inside.
Even the packaging became part of telling that story. Seeing those finished jars arrive for the first time was one of those surreal moments that entrepreneurs dream about. Until then, Masala Makers had existed as recipes, ideas, spreadsheets, samples and prototypes.
Suddenly, it was real. It was something people could hold in their hands.
Now, every time someone messages me to say their family, children or friends loved dinner, that they tried Indian flavours in a family favourite meal, or that they’ve discovered a new favourite recipe, I’m reminded why I started.
Success isn’t about seeing your product on a supermarket shelf. It’s knowing something you’ve created has found a place on someone’s family table.
The mission is bigger than just giving Indian flavours a seat at the table. It’s about giving home cooks the confidence to bring big, bold flavours to their everyday meals with ease.
When I look at the Masala Makers jars sitting on supermarket shelves today, I don’t see the finish line.
I see the beginning.
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