Preston Hollow’s Arpitha Neravetla was in her 40s when she finally mastered her mother’s recipe for perfectly balanced garam masala. Until then, the former business analyst relied on care packages from Hyderabad, the South Indian city where she grew up.
Shoppers can now find her family’s recipe on store shelves closer to home. Neravetla’s company, Spicytude, recently tied for third place in H-E-B’s annual Quest for Texas Best competition, which attracted multiple entries from more than 370 entrepreneurs in 2025.
Spicytude kits use high-quality, carefully sourced spices, step-by-step recipes, and videos to make it simple for home cooks to reproduce authentic Indian dishes. The kits are available at North Texas H-E-B stores, Preston Hollow’s Infused Oils & Vinegars, Empire Baking Company locations, and spicytude.com. Neravetla will also be on hand from Oct. 8 to 18 in the State Fair of Texas’ GO TEXAN Pavilion.
“I specifically designed these kits for the American chef,” she said. “Anybody, even a beginner, will feel comfortable cooking Indian food. And it will come out perfectly every time.”
Neravetla was inspired to create Spicytude after a friend explained that, even with a recipe and ingredients, she still couldn’t make biryani, a flavorful Indian dish that combines basmati rice and rich spices with meats or vegetables.
Neravetla challenged herself to make the recipe easy, but doing so was harder than she thought. It took years to write her method for cooking flavorful biryani, along with recipes for tikka masala and butter chicken sauces, and record videos that she knew would be key to reproducing them at home.
Bringing her idea to consumers posed another set of challenges. To develop her idea, she drew on assistance from SCORE mentorship, a free service funded in part by the Small Business Administration.
“I was still scared to go to the market,” she said. “I had never done that in my life. Finally, after two-and-a-half years, I applied to the Dallas Farmers Market. They gracefully accepted.”
H-E-B’s culinary products development manager stopped by Neravetla’s farmer’s market booth one day, was impressed with her product, and encouraged her to apply for the company’s competition.
Neravetla did not make the finals that year, but she was named one of the top 10 when she tried again in 2025. She made an in-person pitch on stage in San Antonio last fall.
“I’m a little stage shy. I can talk one-on-one, but I don’t like the focus on me. I asked my daughter to be with me,” Neravetla said. “She came and she made me comfortable.”
Since her third-place finish, H-E-B has helped Neravetla bring her product to 25 stores. With help, she still grinds her spices in a Vitamix and mixes them by hand. But she has plans to crank up the flavor in Spicytude’s future.
“My dream is to get into more American stores, so we are in more American kitchens,” she said. “I don’t know how to get there, but one step at a time.”
Neravetla has already expanded her product line at the request of farmer’s market customers. Spicytude kits now include vindaloo, rice pilaf, and chai masala, and Neravetla has plans to add korma and saag.
But her ambitions don’t end in the kitchen. She married at 17, had a daughter at 18, and was on her own at 21. In addition to financial pressure, she had to deal with the stigma of divorce and single motherhood in India.
She would like to eventually donate a portion of her profits to helping girls and women overcome similar struggles.
“Something changed in my life that I can really take this on,” she said. “All my other dreams can come true because of this.”
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