Farang London gives birth to Payst London

I’m sure many of you reading this are aware of Farang’s sister company, Payst by now.

Payst has been a concept sitting on the edge of my mind for years. I recall thinking about it pretty much as soon as I began to cook Thai cuisine, the best part of 10 years ago. I have always found it strange, how such a widely cooked and popular part of the cuisine, the curry, has been represented in the supermarkets so poorly. To me, I consider the difference between a fresh curry paste and an ambient curry paste, to be the same as a fresh tuna steak, or a tin of tuna.

Don’t get me wrong there are a few acceptable products out there, but in general the ambient pastes available on most UK supermarket shelves do not even compare to a fresh curry paste. So much flavour and freshness is lost in the pasteurisation process of the paste to make it long lasting.

Its understandable why these ambient pastes seem to be so prominent within the UK. They are cheaper to produce, store, deliver and have a much longer shelf life. Most of them are produced outside of the UK where the ingredients are more readily available and then brought by boat as a cost effective delivery method. Due to this, long life is necessary, as by the time the paste has hit the shelves, its already most likely a few months old.

There is definitely a place for these products but why not sell the real deal too? Imagine a world where you could only buy tinned tuna, or salmon or vegetables. For some strange reason this is the world we are living in when it comes to Thai curry paste in the UK. Payst’s aim is to change that.

The idea of bringing fresh curry paste to the masses started a long time ago with me, but was constantly pushed to the back burner, as I was cooking 50-70 hours a week in Farang and manging the business on my days off. However the pandemic gave Payst the perfect weather conditions for lift off.

Unfortunately (and kind of fortunately in the end) my brother, Tony was temporarily made redundant from his job as an aerospace engineer, building engines for planes. The pandemic screwed most of us in one way or another and unfortunately, it hit the travel industry hard. This led to plane production being halted immediately and many well trained jobs being laid off overnight.

Me and Tony had been trying to build Payst on our days off at this point, but were moving slowly. So we took this opportunity for Tony to go full time on it. From this, after years and years of thought, Payst London was born and Tony could finally put all those long years of his engineering degree to good use. He was offered his job back when things settled and happily told them to shove it. We hope to one day link his ability to produce vertical take-off engines, with his new role as director of the first wholesale fresh Thai curry paste brand within the UK. We haven’t come up with anything to date.

We started off making all the products in the back prep kitchen at Farang. However, we quickly realised that potentially catering for an entire country out the back of a busy restaurant in Highbury is a pretty dumb thing to attempt. We attempted it all the same.

We have now left the starting gate with a boom and are stocked in over 600 shops UK wide. We can be purchased in Harrods, Selfridges, Daylesford Farmshop and we offer a UK-wide, next day delivery service via our webshop. We are also available to purchase wholesale across Europe, in Kuwait and Dubai.

We will continue to push ourselves out there and in the coming years hope to become a reliable ‘go to’ brand for the home-cook with an interest in cooking fresh, tasty, high quality Thai food at home.

If you haven’t already, get out and give Payst a go.