Yippee-ing it up at the ITC Gardenia

Snubnose and I had a blast at the ITC press event yesterday held at (where else?) ITC Gardenia.

It’s a funny coincidence, just the previous night Snubnose had come home after a playdate at a friend’s place saying she tried the Sunfeast Yippee noodles for the first time, and it was so good, and can we buy some, pretty please?

I hmm’ed and haw’ed and deflected the question only for her to get her wish granted at the #QualityITCFoods press event the very next day!

Event Details

The ITC folks held this press event to dispel a lot of stories that had grown out of the Maggi controversy, and which affected all other ready to eat foods as well.

This was a You Ask We Answer style Q and A style session, very informative and interactive, with the ITC folks patiently answering all the questions we had about the safety and health aspects of their foods.

Some of the famous ITC brands are:

• Aashirwaad (we always buy their atta, which is of top quality)
• Bingo (their chips line)
• Kitchens of India (their premium ready to eat pouches of food)
• Sunfeast (primarily their very tasty biscuits. Have you tasted their Dark Fantasy line? Pure bliss, and their noodles.

Things we learned

1. The Yippee noodles are really tasty.

   This is a pretty duh statement to make, but we used to be hard-core Maggi users, and even though Yippee noodles actually passed all government conducted tests, we hadn’t really tried them. Have to say it was really yummy!

2. The ITC folks led us through the thought process behind the making of Yippee noodles, and led us through the safety and hygiene methods followed at the ITC plant where Yippee is made, and I have to say, it seems very thorough.

   The factory images and videos looked really neat and clean, and it seems they have taken full efforts for food safety.

Here’s a short video providing a walk-through of the factory:

There were lots of questions on trans fats, MSG, sodium, and so on. And they patiently answered every question from the audience.

My final takeaway: This product is perfectly safe. Is it healthy? Well, not so much as other foods, but as they very sensibly said:

There are foods that we consume for different reasons. We eat some food for fun or taste. We eat some foods for convenience, some foods we eat for health benefits. No one food can meet all these needs.

I still wouldn’t use 2-minute noodles as a replacement for a meal, but for those in-between times when kids are hungry and I don’t have a snack on hand, sure why not.

Things we did

After the briefing and Q and A, we had a short interactive fun session, with all of us divided into teams, where we had to have a cook-out with each other using Yippee noodles.

Using the noodles, our team prepared a really yummy katti roll, some papdi chat, and pani puri (but without the pani).

Maybe I am biased, but I thought our food was really good 😉 , and once the judging was complete, we gorged on what we made.

Here are some shots of the food we made.

Unfortunately, the judges didn’t think our food was that good, so we didn’t win a prize. Snubnose though won a special prize for being the youngest and most enthusiastic contestant. Goodness, you should have seen the smiles on her face, when she realized she won something 🙂 .

And what a prize! A Rs.1000/- voucher on a meal at ITC Gardenia!

And then the lunch

So after gorging on our own made food, we then proceeded to make our way to the buffet lunch served at ITC Gardenia. Both Snubnose and I were already feeling stuffed.

But not too stuffed that we couldn’t sample some of the Yippee noodle pizza and their amazing desserts.

We tried their Yippee noodle with vaangi bath masala also, but that didn’t quite hit the spot the way this pizza did.

There were tons of other foods to try, but we saved our appetites for the magnificent desserts.

Overall, we had a fantastic time at the event. The ITC folks were generous, gracious, and lived up to their name for hospitality.

Huge thanks to them for a wonderful interactive and fun session.