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Shivani Dhamija built Shivani's Kitchen from a tiffin delivery service into a food manufacturing company stocked in Sobeys, Walmart, and Costco. The path included a failed web design business, a pandemic restaurant closure, and a lot of crying.

Shivani Dhamija's products sit on shelves at Sobeys, Walmart, and Costco through her company Shivani’s kitchen. The company crossed $1 million in revenue last year, and now operates as a brand and distribution business, focused on developing, marketing, and distributing South Asian food products such as paneer, dosa/idli batter, frozen meals, and other ethnic food products.

Dhamija moved to Canada from India in 2011. She landed in Nova Scotia to be with her partner, Abhishek Asthana. She had studied public relations at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. Work in PR didn't come. She took a cashier job at McDonald's, worked the front desk at Canada Games Centre, and volunteered with the Lung Association of Nova Scotia.

But she was already looking for business opportunities. Her first attempt was a website design company she marketed on Kijiji. She didn't know how to build websites herself. She contracted the work out and tried to sell. "The thing about doing a business is you don't need to have the exact skills of the job you're doing," she said. "You need to know how to sell it."

The web business didn't last. She was 25, had no mentor, and faced heavy competition. But the instinct to build something stuck.

In 2014, Dhamija registered a food delivery business. She had wanted to call it Homemade Tiffin Services, but the name wasn't available. After two failed attempts at the registry, she tried Shivani's Kitchen. It went through.

The early operation was simple: she cooked Indian meals and delivered them to doorsteps around Halifax, serving Dalhousie University students and workers who missed home-cooked food. She marketed through a Facebook page and bought groceries only after securing orders.

By 2015, she'd added cooking classes. Students kept asking about the spices she used. They couldn't find the same blends in local stores. So she started sourcing spices from India and Toronto, blending them herself, and selling them at farmers' markets.

In 2018, Shivani's Kitchen opened a takeout restaurant at Halifax's Seaport Farmers' Market. It was a leap. Dhamija didn't know how to cook at restaurant scale. "I knew how to make basic food at home," she said. "I don't know how to make restaurant style." She travelled to Toronto to learn Indian cooking techniques, then hired a professional chef to standardize her recipes.

The restaurant closed in August 2020. Tourism and cruise traffic around Halifax collapsed, and Dhamija lost a key customer base. "The restaurant was my baby," she told CBC. "I had invested my time, my money, and my dedication to it."

She moved the business into The Station Food Hub, a former school in Newport Station, Nova Scotia. The focus shifted from serving meals to manufacturing packaged products: clean-label sauces, spice blends, paneer, samosas, and frozen dishes. Sobeys had already become her first major retail partner in 2019. The pivot pushed her deeper into retail.

The learning curve was steep. She had to understand margins, packaging design, supply chains, and the difference between provincial and federal kitchen regulations. In one case, a $50,000 Walmart launch was delayed after her team discovered every SKU had the same barcode. The shipment was pulled, relabeled, and delayed by months.

"I hired a consultant who could help me tell what the CPG industry is," she said. When he asked who her target customer was, she answered: "Everyone. They're Canadians mostly." She later learned her products resonated most with first- and second-generation South Asian consumers who wanted clean-label, authentic Indian food.

Shivani's Kitchen products are now in over 1000 grocery stores across Atlantic Canada, with distribution reaching into parts of Ontario. The company spent two years building operational systems, team capacity, and logistics, with the stated goal of scaling toward $10 million. Recently, Shivani’s Kitchen also launched idli and dosa batters, which are  used to make beloved South Indian staples at home. These are available in several Indian stores in Halifax and will soon be launched in Walmart. 

But Canadian geography remains a constraint. Dhamija said shipping a single pallet to Calgary or Vancouver costs around $1,500. "It's easier to send to Boston or send to United Kingdom," she said. "Shipping is insane."

She was named one of the Most Inspiring Immigrants in Atlantic Canada in 2022 and credited the Immigrant Services Association of Nova Scotia with providing business counselling, training, and networking that helped her build the company.

When asked what she'd tell a newcomer who just landed in Canada, her answer was brief: "Build relationships. Please don't be inside your comfort zone. Get out. Ask questions."

Her advice for immigrant entrepreneurs who are already running a business is more specific. "Entrepreneurs don't pay themselves. Please start paying yourself," she said. She learned that lesson when her husband left his IT salary to join Shivani's Kitchen full-time, and banks stopped seeing the couple as creditworthy.

She still cries when problems hit. She still takes risks. The difference, she said, is that the risks are now calculated. "I'm still the same Shivani."

The company’s next challenge is finishing what the restaurant closure started: turning a Nova Scotia-born kitchen into a national food brand without freight costs eating the margins. For Dhamija, the mission is bigger than product distribution. It is about being an immigrant woman building a food brand from Halifax to retail shelves across Canada. “It’s a long game,” she says.