Building a Cheese Culture in Bombay: Mansi Jasani and The Cheese Collective

A successful wealth manager and public relations executive, Mansi Jasani had a lifelong passion for food that led her to pursue a master’s degree in Food Studies at New York University almost 10 years ago. But an epiphany at a legendary cheese shop led to a radical career change. Being from a culture where regular exposure to local cheese started and ended with paneer—a fresh Indian cheese similar to a pressed ricotta, Jasani remembers her first experience at Murray’s Cheese in New York City this way: “It was like Disneyland for me,” she says, “... seeing this much cheese in one store!”

Today Mansi Jasani speaks about cheese with the lit-up exuberance of an infatuated teenager, talking about unique pairings between international cheeses and Indian dishes: “Thepla with fresh plain chèvre and a brie with jamun jam...” (Thepla are rolled flatbreads studded with fenugreek, and jamun is a local fruit similar to plum.) There is a craft chocolate industry in India and she says, “my mind was blown by blue cheese and dark chocolate.” When she sells someone cheese, “it’s like watching one of my babies go off with them.”

Her energy and enthusiasm may be youthful, but her story is one of a business-minded woman who forged an original, unlikely path to becoming a cheesemonger in her native Bombay. India is a huge country where local cheeses don’t move much beyond their localities, and Bombay is a city unaccustomed to such a profession. Jasani’s passion laid the groundwork for her becoming nothing short of a revolutionary, creating a culture around cheese from the ground up in a place where little to none previously existed.

Jasani now operates Bombay’s The Cheese Collective, which she founded in 2014, a phone-order and social media-based business, with equal parts sales, education,and cheesemaking. It is a unique business model befitting the singularity of its proprietor, whose “obsession” with cheese—her word—began a few blocks away from NYU’s campus.

The idea for The Cheese Collective germinated in Jasani during those visits to Murray’s years ago. She found herself returning there often, imbued with curiosity and eager to learn, beginning her self-directed cheese education outside of her academic classrooms. Regular visits turned into occasional recreational classes, which turned into her signing on for Murray’s 3-day, intensive Cheese Boot Camp. It was at the end of her experience there that an epiphany was had, and a resulting course change.

“Everyone around me was cheesed out by the end, but I could still eat more cheese,” laughed Jasani. “Then I knew. I had been trying to figure out what makes me happy. When I realized it was cheese I didn’t want to waste any more time.”

Jasani left her NYU program to begin an affinage internship at The Caves at Murray’s Cheese. Following that, her interest growing ever more serious, she entered a 4-week program at the Vermont Institute of Artisan Cheese, designed to create a serious foundation in cheesemaking and cheese tasting for food professionals. 

“After VIAC I decided I needed to move back to India to spread this cheese love,” she told me. Despite having learned the ins and outs of making cheese herself, as a city dweller her whole life Jasani knew her future spreading that love was as a cheesemonger, not necessarily a cheesemaker. 

“When I moved back I had these big dreams of opening up a smaller version of something like Murray’s with amazing cheese from all over the world, like Murray’s when it was just a tiny shop,” she says. “If i was a hardcore cheesemaker I would have my own farm and do it. But I am a city girl, and cheesemonger at heart.”

Due to some of the particular challenges of establishing a market for cheese from scratch in Bombay, she now does both. Having an actual storefront proved an impracticality, so Jasani relied on Bombay’s word-of-mouth culture, using social media to bolster her efforts, to establish herself as an international cheese expert with local roots. “A lot of it in Bombay is word of mouth,” she describes. “It’s one of the biggest cities in the world, but you still find connections this way. Not many people move in India; people stay where they’re from.” Trust and local connection are more important than reach and exposure.

To that end, rather than just running a cheese delivery business through a website, Jasani relies on advertisements in local and social media encouraging people to call. “We have a lot of clientele that use Whatsapp or call and order. Cheese is a concept that needs a lot of explaining,” Jasani says. “A lot of times they are unfamiliar with the terms—what a rind means, is it edible, what is an aged cheese, etc.” Jasani’s calling is to talk them through it, matchmaking people with cheeses or cheese plates for various occasions.

She describes the market for cheese that she helped to create in Bombay as varied, from people who are well-traveled and appreciate the opportunity for access to styles of cheese they’ve had outside of India, the curious but uninitiated, and an older generation of Bombay citizens that are more interested in learning how to make it themselves than anything—a particular facet of cheesemongering that is hyper specific to Indian culture. “There’s a culture here of eating at a restaurant and then wanting to make it at home,” Jasani says. Followed by the notion of “oh I can make it at home now, so we don’t have to go to the restaurant.” Accordingly, “the requests I get for cheese making are 100 times more than for pairing or appreciation,” says Jasani. “Cheese appreciation is new—they won’t pay just to taste.”

So she’s become an “accidental cheesemaker,” by her assessment, creating fresh cheeses and cream cheese from goat’s milk which is in abundant supply, but that was never being used for cheese production. Her own products, along with international cheeses she is able to source, go toward the making of cheese plates or baskets that through her efforts are becoming more and more sought after.

A yearly celebration between siblings called Rakshabandhan involves a lot of ceremony and gifting. Says Jasani: “People want to send something fun and quirky, and cheese qualifies as that.” Leading up to the celebration on August 3, she found herself “swamped with orders.”

Her life as a Bombay-based cheesemonger has also been a continuation of her cheese education. There are many other Indian cheeses besides paneer, but Jasani confesses she herself didn’t know much about them until after her New York residency. Now, having created exposure for herself as an Indian cheesemonger, she is often invited to food festivals where she is able to see more of what’s happening in her own country and bring it to Bombay including Kalari, a soft, ripened cow’s milk cheese from Jammu; Bandel, a smoked, salted cheese made in West Bengal, and Chhurpi, a yak’s milk cheese made in both hard and soft styles from Sikkim.

Perhaps she will one day see the vision of her own storefront cheese shop realized, but until then Jasani knows she’s doing work that suits her energy and passion: “I will always be a cheesemonger at heart. When curious people eat a new cheese for the first time and they're so happy that they tried it? That makes everything worth it.”