Every year since I left home for college 7 years ago, my immediate family reunites in our South Bay home for a couple weeks during the Christmas holiday.

Typically this time is spent cooking and eating, visiting close family friends, watching some NBA, arguing about inconsequential things, and occasionally traveling. Another constant is the annual unwrapping of my mom’s school gifts. My mom is an elementary school teacher and receives a solid 40+ gifts from her second and third graders each year. This gift opening is a 3+ hour event, where we sit in the living room and my mom opens the gifts while forcing my sister and I to do the bookkeeping and write the thank you cards.

Year after year the distribution of these presents has remained roughly the same. The highest represented groups are the gift card folks (Target, Starbucks, Macy’s, AMC movie tickets), the Micasa china set folks (i.e instant white elephant re-gifts), the chocolate folks, and the homemade goods folks. This last group is always the most exciting for me, because, well, handmade gifts are the best gifts. There’s something special about opening up a jar of homemade olallieberry jam, unwrapping a bar of aromatic soap, or breaking the seal of some nut brittle that has been painstakingly wrapped and decorated.

Inspired by these families in our neighborhood, this year I decided it’d be fun to create and distribute our own homemade gift for the holidays. It would be something from the Pais. I knew it had to be food, and I liked the presentation of mason jars so I decided we would go with that combination. After some brief thinking I narrowed it down to granola or sauce. Sauce seemed like more versatile of the two so I went with that. The vision was to do a classic sauce — recognizable & familiar — but with an Indian kick. The result: tandoori bbq sauce.

Brainstorming

After extensive research (i.e a single Google search) I found some inspiration online. We ended up using much of this recipe as the foundation of our sauce. The next day mom, Did (my sister), and I went shopping for ingredients and arts/crafts for the packaging.

Product development

One day near the end of the holidays I decided it was time to execute. We split up work as follows:

• I was product manager.
• Did was to head up branding and packaging.
• Mom was a swiss-army knife, doing whatever was needed.
• Dad was in charge of watching football and doing ad-hoc work on the side.

The first order of business was sterilizing the jars. Luckily this was something that the Pais are highly trained in, as my dad cans much of his summer tomato crop every year for use during the colder winter months. Sterilizing jars couldn’t be easier: you first rinse them in warm soapy water and then basically boil them for a few minutes.

In parallel, we developed the sauce. This consisted of adding ingredients one at a time to a large pot that was simmering slow and steady and modifying ratios to taste. Among the ingredients that went in were tandoori seasoning, ketchup, espresso powder, Cholula, olive oil, and fresh garlic/ginger paste.

After the sauce was just right, we filled up the sterilized jars and sealed them. The keys here were to let the sauce cool before packaging and also not filling up the jars to be too full. Once full, we gently lidded the jars (not more than finger tight) and boiled them for 45 minutes to create airtight seals.

Branding & packaging

The next step was figuring out what we were going to call the product, what to include on the label, and how the label would look. The goal was to be thoughtful and to spark excitement in whoever received the gift — the delight factor needed to be high.

To that end, I rallied the troops and we did a little visual brainstorming exercise. I gave each person a blank sheet of paper with the label outline pre-drawn, and we all doodled different versions of what the label would look like and what we would call the sauce.

Things we ended up keeping were: title, subtitle, use cases, and “made with <3 in San Jose”. We axed an ingredients list, nutrition facts, recipes, and serving sizes.

Dad also came through big by coming up with a name! He suggested Hero No. 1, a reference to a 1997 Bollywood film with the same name starring the famous Hindi actor Govinda. The name was playful, distinctly Indian, and had just enough syllables, so we went with it.

Did also finalized the look and feel of the label, including little iconography for the use cases:

And we were done! The last thing to do was to reproduce the label many, many times by hand.

Distribution

The final step of this process was to actually distribute our sauce to family and friends! The closest delivery ended up being a about a mile away, while the farthest was about 3000 miles with help from the trusty USPS.

Success

This project ended up being a simple way of bringing the family together. It was short and creative, and everyone was able to contribute something or the other to the end product. It was also fun to involve my parents in the product development mode of thinking that I am accustomed to at work. In all, this definitely looks to be a start of an annual Pai family tradition.