The Story Behind The Blend

1000+ cups

100+ recipes

10+ months

1 perfect cup of chai

We often get asked how we came up with the recipe for our classic masala chai mix. Did you make it yourself? Did you get someone in India to make it then import it? Or, was it perhaps a family recipe passed down over the years? 

When we started, our goal was to craft a cup of chai that tastes like home, so the natural starting point was indeed my nani’s recipe. However, we quickly realized how differently chai is made in each household, often influenced by where in South Asia the family was from. Some make it really sweet, others add a huge kick to it, while some only put in black tea & cardamom. 

This put us in a pickle - how do you make a drink taste like home when everyone’s household chai has a unique flair to it? Our solution was to make a layered, deeply flavorful version that incorporates elements of different chai’s from all over India into one. While great in theory, one wrong move with the spice ratios and we’d look no better than a frat bro making jungle juice with all his favorite drinks at homecoming. 

After three months of iterating on my nani’s recipe, I thought we cracked the code. My wife and I ordered from all the popular chai brands online, sampled grocery store blends (yuck), and went to every chai cafe we could find in NY. Some were more “tea-y,” others had more of a “kick,” but none were able to put it all together in a layered way that made you go “woah” like ours did. That is…until we went to Punjabi Deli. 

Look, if you’re in NYC and want the BEST street chai, Punjabi Deli has you covered. We had just come from a few other spots only five minutes away, but there was honestly no comparison.

The chai was so out of this world I shut down all plans we had of launching Masala Magic - Punjabi Deli was doing everything we wanted our chai to do, and until we had a product that could match or best theirs, I couldn’t in good conscience sell ours. 

Then came the part most entrepreneurs don’t talk about: doubt. It took seven more months of testing to get the mix right, which was a hell-of-a lot longer than we thought it would. When you quit your job with the expectation of launching in a few months, and that turns into almost a year instead, that wears on you real quick, and I’d be lying if I didn’t think about quitting multiple times throughout. 

In the end, we easily went through 100+ variations of the blend before we landed on the final one. We were so obsessive about getting things right we were measuring ratios to the 1/24th of a teaspoon to make sure everything was perfect. While it passed the aunty test with flying colors and was a hit at every chai party we hosted, there was one final test: was this something we'd be proud of launching? 

Given you’re reading this and the product is live on the site, we think you know the answer to that one :)