The long journey of a sadhya

While Cold Chains Carry Traditional Sadhyas To Malayali Communities Abroad, Growing Commercialization Is Changing

How Families Celebrate Onam In Kerala

The journey of an Onam sadhya to Frankfurt begins not in Germany, but in a catering kitchen in Kochi. Here, avial, olan, thoran, pachadi and payasam are prepared months before the festival, frozen, packed and readied for a journey that will take the traditional Kerala feast thousands of kilometres away. Some consignments travel by air, others by sea, moving through a temperature-controlled chain before reaching Malayali households in Germany, the US, Ireland and Spain.

At Vinayaka Caterers in Kadavanthra, which handled one such large consignment to Germany, the process began long before Onam. The caterer recently exported frozen Onam sadhya, including banana leaves, from Kochi to Germany, catering to around 30,000 people.
“We got a good Malayali client there for importing frozen Onam sadhya. The customer just needs to boil it before serving. We freeze it at our facility following all the parameters,” says Mahadevan Iyer, manager of Vinayaka Caterers.

The work begins months before Onam. Exporters typically prepare and freeze consignments three to four months in advance. Freshly cooked dishes are rapidly chilled and blast-frozen at around minus 40°C before being stored in ultra-cold freezers. Under these conditions, packaged meals can have a shelf life of up to two years, according to industry players, provided they remain continuously frozen.

The meals are packed in heavy-duty, microwave-safe containers designed to prevent spillage during transit, while banana leaves are packed alongside them. Moving thousands of meals across continents requires an unbroken cold chain, with the food maintained at minus 18°C or below. Shipments can combine air or sea freight, including refrigerated containers, with temperature-controlled road transport at either end.

Nilamels and Kaimals Foods Pvt Ltd in Thiruvananthapuram, another company exporting frozen Kerala food, recently sent frozen Onam sadhya to Ireland, the US and Spain. The company says it is witnessing growing demand for frozen sadhya from Europe and the US, where the Malayali diaspora has expanded in recent years.
“Frozen Onam sadhya is becoming a trend as food processing units with blast freezing technology are doing it. The customer needs to thaw and heat it before serving,” says Vinod Kumar R, general manager of the firm.

Depending on the product, the preparations can then be boiled or reheated in a microwave. Food processing companies say blast freezing helps retain the texture, consistency and flavour of dishes such as avial, olan, pachadi and payasam.

For younger Malayali migrants, the attraction is also convenience. Some may not have the time to prepare a traditional sadhya; others may be unfamiliar with the elaborate cooking involved. Some exporters even place a leaflet inside the pack explaining the traditional order in which the dishes are to be served. A larger Malayali community has also made it easier to recreate the wider Onam experience abroad. Tinu Johny Parokkaran, a nurse who migrated from Angamaly to Frankfurt in 2017, says the celebrations have evolved with the community.

“We make the floral carpets with the flowers available in Germany, which are mostly imported from Holland. As the population of Keralites increased manifold in Germany, our celebration has become more vibrant and intense,” he says.

“For Onam, catering services are available serving all the traditional dishes. To be honest, we celebrate the festival here with the same sense of happiness and without losing its essence,” says Parokkaran.
The same festival, meanwhile, is changing in Kerala too. The elaborate feast that once meant hours of chopping, stirring and simmering is increasingly being outsourced to caterers as families choose to spend the festival together rather than spend the day preparing food. The trend is particularly visible among nuclear families where both partners work.

For caterers, Thiruvonam morning is a race against time. The challenge is not merely cooking but preparing, packing and delivering thousands of meals before noon. A catered sadhya for five members typically costs around Rs 2,300 to Rs 3,000, depending on the number of dishes.

“At present, there is huge demand for Onam sadhya on Thiruvonam Day. But we take bookings for a maximum of 3,000 customers as we have to prepare the food, pack it and transport it before noon. Earlier, we used to prepare palada payasam with 300 to 400 litres of milk. Now it has increased to 600 litres due to the surge in demand,” says Shibu Manayath of Manayath Catering in Vaikom.

Mahadevan Iyer says the change has been dramatic. When his father began catering in the late 1980s, Onam sadhya orders were largely limited to offices and marriage functions because most families still prepared the feast at home.

“Now everything has changed along with the changing times. There must be around 10% of people preparing Onam sadhya at home now. The rest buy it through catering services or have it from restaurants,” he says.

As Onam increasingly moves out of the household, literary figures see a deeper change beneath the convenience, the growing commercialisation of a festival once rooted in family and community.

“We have Onam, Onathappan and Aarpuvili, but there is no life in them. It has become a tableau. In the rapidly changing world of mechanisation, we need Onam as we need an escape, but we do not know how to celebrate it. The spirit of Onam is a family get-together — a platform to clear differences among family members and relive nostalgia.”

The concern over the erosion of Onam traditions, however, is not new. Sasibhooshan points to the writings of poet P Kunhiraman Nair, who wrote extensively about Onam and lamented the gradual disappearance of the festival’s inherent features, a change he viewed as inevitable.

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