Bipen Sharma arrived in Australia in his early twenties with nothing. No savings, no connections, no plan beyond a feeling that he needed a change. His first job was on the grill at the Hilton, cooking steaks for a man who had never eaten beef in his life. He was vegetarian. He became, by all accounts, one of the best steak men they had.
That willingness to do what needed doing, and to do it properly, would explanation for everything that followed.
Today, 30 years after Bipen left the restaurant trade to start making yoghurt dips in a Sydney kitchen, Sharma’s Kitchen is preparing to open a factory in Amritsar, Punjab. The man who arrived with nothing is going home with a business that spans three continents, over 100 staff, four Australian Grand Dairy Award champion titles and a gold medal at the International Cheese and Dairy Awards—the first Indian brand ever to win it.
The factory in Amritsar is about 80 percent built. It will open in 2027, built to Australian standards rather than local minimums, which is, as Bipen puts it, the point. “We are not entering a market. We are going back. And the standard is the thing we are actually selling.”
His family is from Punjab. He grew up in Chandigarh, not far from where the new factory is being built. The circle, as his daughter Tanisha observes, is very round.
Bipen came to Melbourne first, working in hospitality before opening three Indian restaurants under the name Sando’s. He was, Tanisha says, possibly the first Indian restaurant to receive a chef’s hat. The restaurants were popular. Celebrities came. Musicians came. He met a lot of people and learned a lot about what the Australian market would and would not accept.
What it would not accept, he noticed, was the paneer he was serving. People ordered the spinach dishes and left the paneer on the side of the plate. That told him something. “The processes and ingredients they were using to make the paneer were not necessarily correct,” Tanisha says. “So he went on this journey to really learn how to make paneer using Australian milk and Australian ingredients, and make sure he could get the correct quality so that people weren’t leaving it on the side of the plate.”
He moved to Sydney, opened a restaurant Café Bombay on Oxford Street, and began making dips out of necessity. The Indian products he needed for the restaurant simply did not exist in Australia at the standard he wanted. Mint and coriander raita. Cucumber raita. Two flavours. That was the whole company.
The first factory was a small rented space in Gosford, New South Wales. Then came Hornsby, their own facility. “You do not build your own plant unless you have already decided,” Bipen says. The decision had been made.
By 1998 the dahi was selling the way milk sells, week after week, the same customers coming back. By 2000 the Hornsby factory was built and the direction was clear. In 2012, Bipen did something that by his own daughter’s admission she still cannot entirely explain. He picked up, went to Europe, and built a brand from scratch in Bulgaria, choosing it for one practical reason: easy access to buffalo milk, which meant he could make traditional Indian sweets and a richer style of paneer that Australian dairy could not replicate. That brand, called Dairy Valley, is now the leading Indian dairy brand in Europe and the UK, stocked in Tesco, Sainsbury’s and retailers across Germany, France, Poland, the Netherlands, Romania and beyond.
“I didn’t know that we would have so much demand,” Tanisha says. “But us Indians are everywhere apparently.”
Tanisha is 35, Chief Marketing Officer and fastest paneer packer in the company’s history, a record she is still quietly proud of and will occasionally test. She joined Sharma’s Kitchen straight out of her Bachelor of Commerce, as did her brother Akaash, who now runs the European operation from Bulgaria. The condition her father set for both of them was the same: start at the bottom.
“He was very adamant that in order to earn respect with the staff, you have to really have an understanding of the business,” she says. “And the best way to do that is to work from the ground up.”
She packed paneer. She did compliance, HR, ordering, production. She learnt everything before she decided what she was best at. That turned out to be marketing, though she could not have known it from a commerce degree alone.
Growing up in the business was, she says, a complicated experience that most Indian family business children will recognise. “You always went as a chore, but you ended up loving seeing your parents and how hard they were working. You loved it, you hated it, but it was always there.”
The family dynamic is not what people expect when they hear the words Indian family business. Bipen has raised two strong-willed, openly opinionated children and has always treated them equally. “My dad might say it’s not the best thing now because I’m a little too opinionated,” Tanisha says, laughing. “But he’s always maintained that it’s not just his decision, it’s our decision as a whole.”
Disagreements happen. They are mostly about pace rather than direction. Bipen will sometimes push back on ideas that his Australian-born children have developed with an Australian lens. “He’ll often have to educate us that it’s a good idea, but you’re looking at it from an Australian point of view, and that’s not going to translate to an Indian market,” Tanisha says. “It’s a push and pull between all of us, always.”
The awards are the other thing people do not fully expect from an Indian dairy brand. Since 2017, Sharma’s Kitchen has won the Australian Grand Dairy Award grand champion title multiple times, competing blind against mainstream Australian dairy producers. The judges are not Indian. They have no particular frame of reference for the products. They just taste them.
“If they love it, then we’re doing the right thing,” Tanisha says. “Not just on the basis of the Indian community, but with everyone.”
The company has deliberately stayed out of major supermarkets, a decision that surprises people given the awards and the scale of the operation. The reason is straightforward. The terms the major supermarkets offer are not fair to the smaller Indian and South Asian stores that have stocked Sharma’s Kitchen since the beginning. “We want to make sure that we support the guys that have been there with us from the start,” Tanisha says.
In Europe, they are in the major supermarkets. In Australia, they are not. It is a distinction the family is comfortable with.
The Amritsar factory is the piece that matters most right now. It carries a different weight to Bulgaria or the new Australian export hub in Fairfield. This one is personal. Bipen is going back to Punjab, to a place near where he grew up, to build something to a standard that India’s dairy industry has not prioritised. He is not going back to compete on price. He is going back to compete on quality, which is the only competition he has ever entered.
There is something quietly remarkable about an Indian-born man who arrived in Australia with nothing, who cooked steaks he had never eaten at a hotel grill, who worked his way into restaurants and then realised the products he needed for those restaurants did not exist, who made them himself in a rented space in Gosford, who built factories on two continents and raised two children who are now running the business he built, and who is now going back to the country where all of it began.
“Slow is not the same as behind,” Bipen says. “And you cannot sell quality by saying the word quality. You have to give people something they can check for themselves.”
Thirty years on, the paneer stays on the plate.
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