What’s in a name, why BANG! Curry?
When I first thought of the name BANG! Curry it just made sense straight away. All our product recipes centre around my Bangladeshi heritage, we help people make a bang in their kitchen and our customers tell us the flavours are banging!
What does a day in the life of Shelly Nuruzzaman look like?
I wake up early before the family, get a peaceful cup of tea in the garden before the hustle of the morning routine.
I make sure my teenage boys get a decent breakfast (which is a mission!) and send them off to school on a good note.
Then I get stuck into BANG! Curry and the objectives for the day. This could be anything from seeing a potential customer to do a cookery demo, working on new content for marketing, attending a trade show or liaising with the team on product development. It’s really varied which keeps me on my toes.
Having my own business allows me to navigate work around our family schedule too; this flexibility outweighs the inevitable pressures of running my own business.
Your journey to BANG! has been unconventional – from Scientist to Entrepreneur, talk us through how you came to this point?
It is a bit of a 180 isn’t it! For years I was immersed in science and research, from my university days where I studied a PhD in Inertial Confinement Fusion at Imperial College London, to my career in the city.
I then had my two sons and I was at home and cooking more than ever before. It gave me a new outlook on food and led me to think about nutrition as well as the actual flavour of the food.
It also brought back a lot of memories of how my mum used to cook for me. She would spend hours playing around in the kitchen, transforming the simplest of ingredients into something really special. I wanted to do the same for my boys – and help others do it too – but in way which was simpler and quicker. That’s when the idea of creating meal kits came to me. I wanted to create kits that do the complicated legwork of a curry dish, leaving you to just do three easy steps in your kitchen to create an amazing, authentic dish.
I decided to take the plunge and swapped the laboratory for my kitchen, spending two years perfecting the formulas for the BANG! Curry kits. Getting just the right blend of 14 or 15 spices right is really tricky. There are so many different combinations and just the smallest tweak can result in a completely different flavour. I became a spice hacker and my children and husband became great taste-testers!
Launching just before the pandemic does not seem to have hindered you, but it must have been tough, how did you navigate your way through?
During lockdown, everyone was cooking from home and so we were in the right place at the right time. BANG! Curry is perfect for home cooks who are looking for that feel good spark in the kitchen. We want people to get stuck in – chopping, stirring and getting their hands dirty – but in simple and easy-to-follow steps. We grew 600% during this time and our following has remained loyal ever since. However, the flipside of that is our retailer growth plans were stalled. We had no choice but to focus on our online sales and make those work hard for us. That is turning a corner now though, and we have recently been listed in Waitrose stores which is a huge milestone for the business.
I am a huge fan of your kits & I love the packaging with the apron & all…but I’d love to know what your best selling product is?
Our bestsellers are the Dahl and the Jalfrezi – they are the household staples that so many of our customers love and buy over and over again.
What advice do you have for any female entrepreneurs out there looking to take that leap.
The same advice I’d give to any entrepreneur – test the validity of your idea as you will need to pour every ounce of energy into your vision. I did exactly the same in the very early days of BANG! Curry. I needed to prove the concept would work and that people were interested in creating Indian dishes in their own kitchens, so I ran group cookery lessons from my home. They were really popular and confirmed to me that there would be demand, so I then poured all the profits from the classes back into product development and trialled them at farmers markets to get customer feedback to help refine the recipes.
You grew up in Brick Lane…do you feel like the universe has brought you full circle with Bang?
Absolutely yes! It’s all very weird when I think about it. I would never have imagined I’d be doing this as a young girl – I was anything but traditional and so starting a curry business linked to cooking was not really on the cards. But life has a funny way of working out, and you somehow end up exactly where you’re meant to be.
And finally…What’s your favourite spice?
That’s a tricky one! If I had to choose I’d go with chilli and coriander as I find a place for these two in most things.
To view and purchase the BANG! Curry range please visit bangcurry.com