Step into the Agarwals’ kitchen, and you will notice several pairs of hands working together to make a batch of besan barfi.

The right amount of besan (gram flour), jaggery, and most importantly, ghee and nuts go into each batch.

We took a bite of this barfi made by the team, and there was a burst of flavour. The besan was well roasted; every bite was soft, with the occasional crunch of nuts and the richness of ghee binding it all together. 

At the heart of the barfi is Sunita Agarwal’s recipe.

At 62, Sunita has spent much of her life cooking for her family as a homemaker who loved making sweets and savouries. “Since childhood, I was always fond of making sweets and snacks,” she says.

For years, she made them for her children. She occasionally bought sweets from outside, but often felt that the quality was not what she wanted for her family. 

“So I started making it for them,” she says.

As her children grew older and she found herself with more time, Sunita continued doing something she had always loved: meeting friends and family and sharing food with them. 

Whenever she made something with her own hands, people around her liked it. Slowly, a thought began to take shape.

“Why not make this a business?” she wondered.

That thought eventually became Kitchen and Gupshup (K&G) in 2022.

When four homemade favourites became a biz 

In 2022, Sunita started K&G as a home kitchen with just four items: besan barfi (gram flour fudge), gond barfi (edible gum sweet), masala channa daal (spiced roasted gram) and Mathris (crispy savoury crackers). 

By 2024, the venture had expanded to 30 SKUs across Savoury and Sweet and officially started running the business from a commercial kitchen while continuously expanding their menu items and adhering to standard food safety and standard measures.

Initially, the business focused only on Guwahati. The family spent the next year serving customers there and gaining confidence from the positive feedback they received. 

Around this time, Sunita’s son, Rajvardhan, joined her in the venture.

He had left his job and was figuring out what to do next when Sunita suggested taking the business a little further.

“I left my job, and we were figuring out what was to be done. That’s when my mom said, ‘Let’s make this bigger,’” Rajvardhan........

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