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Prawn Again

News From : DagangHalal.com (15 Nov 2009)

Shelley Seid meets the man who invented the prawn burger. Businessman Sooveir Rajkumar says people love prawns, but that with today’s fast-paced lifestyle, cleaning them is about as attractive as stuffing a mushroom.

And so he invented South Africa’s first commercially available prawn burger.

For his efforts, he recently won the SAB KickStart Enterprise Development Initiative and R200000.

Rajkumar is high energy. He’s 35 and this is already his fifth business. The others, which included a panel-beating company and a general dealer’s store, brought a mixed degree of success but never dampened his enthusiasm.

The unconventional product of a conventional Durban Indian family, Rajkumar says he was driven to cook as a teen because he couldn’t cope with spicy food.

“I would tear up and have to drink loads of water.”

He has been fiddling around in the kitchen ever since and has been known to disappear into restaurant kitchens for hours, where he bonds with the chef and adds to his repertoire.

In 1999, he joined forces with an old friend in Zambia who had a meat-processing factory.

In no time at all, he had grown the product line from four to 27 items. He spent the next four years designing products – he’s particularly proud of his pork-free halal pepperoni and cabanossi sausages – and steadily growing his market.

Then he wanted to come home, so he did and spent 18 months researching the market.

“Initially, I wanted to do an uncrumbed chicken patty,” he says. “But the buyers were lukewarm, so I had to find something different.”

A prawn burger is different, with low cholesterol and no synthetic binding agents. And the prawns are pre-drained so they don’t send out a torrent of water and shrink to nothing while they are cooking, and they contain a hint of garlic and coriander.

“It came to me that people love prawns but find them a bother to cook. I had no machinery available and I didn’t want to use another butcher’s equipment, so I used the wife’s food processor and whipped up a batch. Friends and family loved them and that was that,” says Rajkumar.

He boxed and branded them and took the final product, as part of the Boastful Butcher range, to potential outlets.

In my opinion, his Lunch Munch burger range is even more innovative. These are patties that are shaped to fit a sandwich rather than a bu

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