Sangeeta Sengupta is the Founder and Director of TiffinWalli® CIC, a charitable company based in Newham. Its social mission is to help determined and talented disadvantaged women change their lives through cuisine and culinary skills. 

Sangeeta shares the challenges and barriers that Asian women face in getting employment in East London and how her unique business was born as a creative solution to the women’s lack of access to employment. It also helps with social isolation, health and well-being, and community building.  

Through support and encouragement from our team and through support from our free year-round Capacity Building Programme, Sangeeta applied for a Capital grant from our Westfield East Bank Creative Futures Fund. 

TiffinWalli® CIC’s project is to support and train Asian women interested in developing skills and expertise in creative ideas to produce traditional and modern food for both future employment opportunities and/or establishing their own businesses.

They now provide catering and food services to the NHS and other corporate organisations.

Here’s their story and how their project grant funding has positively impacted the women involved.

Photo & video: Chris Baker

Part 1

Transcript: So my background is training and employment. So I helped people within the community with the training and then we recruit people for the NHS trust, etc. So we always find this group of people are women who are far away from employment market never fit in those categories to find a sustainable job opportunities. This is due to they being moved from different countries. The lack of English language, very low qualifications, and then the caring responsibilities, either looking after the family or the children. 

But they are so far away from the employment market, they can’t find any jobs, and even they find some jobs which required very long hours of working like care assistance and then in the catering as well, kitchen assistant. Those jobs are really long hours jobs, so time to time we interacted with those people and they keep on saying that what you can do for us.

Part 2

Transcript: So we did a survey along the way. We attend a few events and in the survey with those type of women,  they came up with ideas that they interested doing, utilizing their existing skills, which is cooking. So we then thought that why don’t we, you open a catering business where we can give them the flexible working hours and they use this existing cooking skills. We will help them with the professional cooking skills and upskill them little bit and they can work with the catering business. 

So we started the catering business we named as a TiffinWalli. The idea came from Dabbawala in Bombay (Mumbai), which provides lunch in Dabba (Tiffin Box) to the men at work. ‘Tiffin’ is the box and the ‘Wali’ is the female version of ‘Wala’, which is men.

Part 3

Transcript: We really wanted to get our yoghurt project to start so that we can help more women with the employment. So yoghurt project is a recipe which is came from our participants. During the COVID time, we were checking on different recipes and one of the participants provided us one recipe analysis to do wanted to test this yoghurt, and we tested and it was amazing. So we thought, why don’t we make this yoghurt as a more mainstream market? So and we sell this yoghurt to generate income which can help not only the employment in the production line, but also make our organisations more sustainable. 

So for that yoghurt, particular yoghurt project, we applied for the capital funding and the funding amazingly, helping us to start this, we we are launching this product in December, hopefully if everything goes right. So we are very thankful to the Future Fund without that funding, it wasn’t without the capital funding, mostly because not many organisations provide capital funding. Without that, it wouldn’t be possible.

Part 4

Transcript: What we see that these are very talented women. They are being praised by the families and the friends. But then that particular skills never being used, never being being shared with the external people.But they are very passionate about the cooking. They feel very happy when somebody praised it. So the whole purpose was that to bring these food and their art, their talent to be shared with the external people, not limited to the friends and family, and also to ways of generating income for them.

So they work as a self-employed basis with us and employment that some people cannot work full time or even the part time because they are very young kids. So we asked them to be self-employed and supply food to us. So that way they kind of get engaged. So we, we usually look into the various way supporting these women, not the traditional way that we will have that 9 to 5, or, particular our support. So we look into that, what’s their needs, where’s their difficulties they are facing. That’s why the organisation in first place we created to support these women and bring their talent out. And I’m not a good cook, but I really appreciate somebody when cooked delicious food. I said, why we can’t share it with others and specially the food is some way it’s to connect with people. So we want these women’s to get connected with people.

To learn more about TiffinWalli® CIC and its project, check out the “Making Her-Story Project” page on our website. 

To learn more about the Westfield East Bank Creative Futures Fund, see our Grant Programme page.