About Us
Wood Street Sauce Co. is a Bangalore-based range of small-batch sauces and condiments, made by Karan Upmanyu.
A chef by occupation, Karan has worked in a number of leading restaurants across Adelaide, Bangalore, Barcelona, Girona, New Delhi and New York, picking up techniques and interacting with new ingredients. He moved to Bangalore for work in 2017, and fell in love with the city and its food culture! He loved that Bangaloreans are discerning about food and open to trying new things. In 2020, when the pandemic hit and restaurants shut down for months together, Karan’s restlessness to keep cooking led to the birth of Wood Street Sauce Co. Now, any spare moment that he is not at the restaurant is spent in his home kitchen, just off Wood Street in Central Bangalore, making large pots of sauce!
Inspired by iconic condiments from around the globe and made with locally sourced ingredients, our offerings work as both ingredients to cook with, and as sauces that you can simply spoon out of the jar and eat along with a snack.
Note: Our products are handmade and homemade, so while strive for consistency there may be slight variations from batch to batch.
The Name
Wood Street Sauce Co. is named after one of our favourite places in our home city of Bangalore, where our founder lives and works. The quiet, sleepy, tree-lined Wood Street in the heart of the city somehow manages to capture everything we love about Bangalore and its food culture. An Udupi darshini on one end, some of the city’s most iconic and stylish restaurants on the other, one of our favourite meat and cold storage shops, a shawarma and kabab restaurant that is a city-wide institution, a coffee company, a hole-in-the-wall Hot Chips stall, an ice cream parlour, a quietly thriving Korean restaurant, an old-timey, rock-n-roll-playing, draught-beer-serving pub... should we go on? It is a microcosm of nearly everything this city’s food scene has to offer!
So when we decided to make a range of pantry staples for the city’s discerning food lovers, we knew exactly what we would call it. Wood Street Sauce Co. is an ode to Bangalore’s eclectic food culture, and a tip of the hat to the quiet yet iconic Wood Street.
The Team
Ours is a small team of three. Supporting Karan and his sauce dreams are Shivani and Devyani. Shivani Unakar, a freelance food researcher and writer, spends her free time working on Wood Street's communications. Devyani Maskeri, formerly our logistics manager, now works in talent acquisition by day and moonlights as Wood Street's hand model and all-round support system.