We want to increase our footprint across India: Srinivas Kamath, Naturals

In 1984, an ice-cream parlour at Mumbai’s Juhu beach started serving ice-cream flavoured with fresh fruits. This was how late Raghunandan Srinivas Kamath’s launched “Natural Ice Cream”, a brand that has now become synonymous with ice-cream. Naturals has grown into a pan-India chain with 138 stores.

exchange4media caught up with Srinivas Kamath, Director of Kamaths Ourtimes Ice Creams Pvt. Ltd, to trace the success journey of the brand.

Excerpts from the conversation: 

Take us through the initial journey of Naturals.

My father was working with his elder brother who was running an Udupi restaurant. Being Mangaloreans, that came naturally to them. However, after my father got married and was expecting his first child, he decided to start his own venture. Being in the food industry, he interacted with many people and got the sense that ice-cream was much in demand.  

It was 1984 when he decided to start an ice cream business but he was sure that he wanted to do something different. He wanted to use natural ingredients like milk, fruits and dry fruits to prepare ice-cream instead of chemicals and additives. And he decided that Juhu beach was the ideal place to start. A number of Bollywood celebrities would frequent the beach those days. Locals and tourists would also hang out on the beach in large numbers, especially in the evening post-dinner. Hence, this was the perfect spot to sell ice-creams and create a buzz. 

What were the initial challenges? 

Since he had chosen fresh fruits as the ingredient, the biggest challenge was to deseed them. Setting up the kitchen, getting the technology in place for deseeding and working with just five people that included my mother and grandmother were the other challenges. There was a huge demand for his ice-creams but he was unable to scale up and meet the demand due to these constraints. 

He used to frequent Andheri MIDC that time to see some industries so that he could find a suitable one for his venture. Eventually, he did some jugaad to find solutions to his challenges of deseeding and freezing. 

Over the years, how have you uniquely connected with consumers – is it word of mouth, supply chain innovations or advertising?

Our first parlour became quite popular because celebrities living at Juhu beach used to visit it often. They provided us with the initial boost as many of their fans used to visit our parlour hoping to see film stars. The ‘word of mouth’ publicity worked very well for us as we didn’t have any marketing budgets. And, of course, our product spoke for itself. 

Tell us about your most popular advertising campaigns in recent years.

It was in 2014, when we opened our first store in Delhi. The store was wrapped up a month ahead of the launch. Social media was at the peak at that time. Many big influencers wrote about the launch and that created a hype, although we had not engaged them. A day before the launch, we issued advertisements that matched the social media hype. It led to an amazing response. We got one million sales within seven days, which is a record for us. 

Which ad agency do you work with and what is the ad expenditure today compared to what it was before the pandemic?

We work with a boutique agency called Drink Water. They are based in Mumbai and have a small team with professionals of vast experience. They also started their journey with us. Our marketing budget is less than 3 per cent of our turnover. 

The pandemic did hit us badly as our stores were shut for a long time in many areas across India. Even when we resumed fully post the second wave, people avoided having ice creams due to misconceptions. Then we had to create awareness around that. We ran campaigns to assure people that ice-cream is being prepared in a safe and hygienic environment. A part of our marketing budget was spent around that.  

Who do you see as your biggest competitor?

Any ice cream brand which operates in the parlour format is our competitor. But the pandemic has changed everything. Many boutique stores have come up in the market which don’t necessarily have the stores. They operate through cloud kitchens in small pockets of the city. Now, the competition is with the smaller and newer brands in the market. 

Are you planning to change your strategy and start selling through malls?

In the pandemic, when we were not able to serve people directly at the parlours we tied up with the cloud kitchen-Rebel-which has now grown into a unicorn. This move was aimed to retain the customers at those uncertain times when nobody knew how long the pandemic would continue. Not at the supermarkets or malls, but we are also exploring the online options so that we can deliver our products through food delivery services. 

What are your long-term plans?

First things first - we wish to mitigate our risk factors. We can’t depend on delivering only through parlours. We have to look up other avenues as well. Secondly, we want to increase our footprint across India. Right now, we are concentrating on the western and southern regions. We penetrated the Delhi market but we have not reached 75 per cent of India. Having more stores will also help us mitigate our risks in future. If stores are shut down in some parts of the country due to infections, we can operate through stores in other parts.  

Thirdly, we want to strengthen our back-end channels. During the pandemic, our supply chain and vendors were badly affected. We want to work closely with them now. 

Any plans to go global?

Not yet, but as they say - never say never. We get almost 100 inquiries a day from across the world. However, we want to focus on the Indian market at present as over 75 per cent is yet to be penetrated. We have 138 stores at present and our plan is to make the count double in the next two to three years.

Watch the full conversation here: