Chutney goes global: From Indian kitchens to Caribbean music and British supermarket shelves

Chutney is a condiment with many passports. In India, it's as basic as something pounded, ground, or mixed in kitchens, changing its flavour profiles with the seasons and regions. And then it travelled.

In the Caribbean, Indian migrants carried their foodways with them, and chutney became music. Bhojpuri folk traditions met calypso and soca, producing the hybrid 'chutney soca'. Trinidadian singer Drupatee Ramgoonai officially coined the term with her 1987 album Chatnee Soca. But the ball had started rolling way back in 1969 with fellow Trinidadian Sundar Popo, the 'father' of chutney music, coming up with the hit track, 'Kaise Bani', with its stirring chorus, 'Phulari bina chutney kaise bani?' (How can fritters be made without chutney?)

In 2020, Tamil singer-songwriter Sean Roldan released 'Idli Chutney', a playful number on how 'Without idli/ There is no chutney'. This happens to be my earworm these days.


Chutney can become rhythm, song, cultural hybrid and, if Salman Rushdie is allowed into the conversation, a way of describing language. In his 1981 novel, Midnight's Children, Rushdie used 'chutnification' for the mixing and transformation of English with Indian languages.

Chutney always enjoyed the status of a market commodity abroad, rather than the homemade and regional varieties that's here in India. Called 'blatjang' in Afrikaans, Cape Town produced its own Mrs HS Ball's Chutney in the 1900s, a sweet mango flavoured one in a city with a sizeable Indian population.

I discovered more during an unscientific, but enjoyable, recent market survey in London. I stopped at supermarket shelves and found delicious jars of mango, red onion, Ploughman's, chilli, caramelised onion, tomato, fig, and honey chutneys. Among the Raj-era versions were Bengal Club, Colonel Skinner's, and Major Grey's.

Sharwood's mango chutney smiled sweetly this summer. I love it that chutney in Britain has escaped the Indian restaurant and sits beside cold meats, sandwiches, poppadums and crackers, and has earned a place on the cheese board.

The British chutney shelf is part of a much older story of Indian flavours travelling West. Sharwood's, for instance, traces its origins to James Allen Sharwood's travels to India in the 19th c and says it introduced Green Label Mango Chutney to Britain in 1889. By 1893, the company had begun working with Vencatachellum Madras Curry Powder, distributing Indian condiments before developing a chutney brand of its own.

India's vegetable chutney repertoire is expanding into packaged foods, driven by ecommerce, packaging innovations, and consumers' appetite for both fusion and traditional foods. A Kissan executive shared with me a Nielsen-based estimate that India's existing packaged chutney market is roughly ₹350 cr. About ₹200 cr is Schezwan, followed by tamarind, garlic and mint or pudina.

Coconut chutney, despite its ubiquity in South Indian homes, remains tiny as a packaged category, perhaps because of its fresh ingredients and short shelf life, but my South Indian friends swear by it. Chutney is estimated to have roughly 4x as many usage occasions as ketchup, and the packaged market may be capturing only a fraction of what Indians consume.

GlobalData puts the chutneys-and-relishes category, including sweet pickles, at ₹5,586 cr in 2023, after growing at a 10.07% CAGR from 2018 to 2023. Its newer 2024 analysis puts the category at ₹5,902 cr, up 5.65% y-o-y, with a 2019-24 CAGR of 8.99%. Tata Sampann, Dabur, Mother's Recipe, iD and Haldiram's are putting ready-to-eat chutneys into jars, pouches and tubs.

The British supermarket shelf shows what happens when chutney becomes a food category and eventually a flavour habit. India's bottled-chutney boom may be small, but its online fridge or quick commerce isn't. And that's why it is interesting that the next big packaged-food story may not be another imported sauce. It could jolly well be the green, red, brown, sour, hot, sweet and gloriously unruly chutneys that Indians have been making all along.