 Hello and welcome to the Pride of India show. Our guest today is Srinivas Kamath, Director at Natural Science Claim. This Indian brand was launched first at Juhu Beach of Mumbai way back in 1994. Since then, it has grown into a pan India chain with more than 135 or more stores, I guess. Welcome to the show, Mr. Srinivas Kamath. Thank you. Pleasure to have you. Please take us through the initial journey of naturals. So naturals were started by my father way back in 84 and before that he was working with his elder brother in the Santa Cruz area of Mumbai. My dad's elder brother was running a restaurant. So it was a Uddupi restaurant. We came from Mangalore so that was a specialty and so he got married. He was expecting his first child. So it was a moment where he thought like I should be starting something of my own and since he was already interacting with a lot of the customers and being in the restaurant industry, he sensed that there's going to be a huge demand for ice creams in the coming years and that's how the idea sort of came into his mind. But what he wanted to do was something very different. Like there were other ice cream parlours but he wanted to concentrate on natural offerings. When I say natural offering, it's like fruits, milk, whatever, the combination of without adding any additives, chemicals or any artificial flavor. So that's how he started and it's very interesting how he decided to find the location like very close to Jew Beach. Like that time there were no malls, there were no shopping complexes. So a lot of people for the entertainment people used to only go to Jew beaches or at the most watch movies and there was a kind of a culture where people used to have early dinner like let's say seven o'clock and then used to go out and eat fast food items that quick and that's where he concentrated on opening somewhere where already the customers were already there and that's how we decided upon opening in Jew. What were your initial challenges? Well for us, the most difficult part was that all these fruits that we selected like be it Sitafal, the custard apple or Sharifa is called in North. There were no as such technology where you could deceive the fruit. So you had to use only your manual, you have to use your hands to do it. So it was very tedious, it was very taking a lot of time and that time there were only five or six people including my mom, my grandmother also used to help my dad in setting up the kitchen, deceiving the fruits, peeling the fruits and that was the initial challenge. You find the technology like to sort of even if there was demand for our ice creams, we could not scale up as much as we wanted. Slowly my dad had to sort of use his engineering mind though he was a 10th dropout but he was always fascinated by engineering and inspired by a lot of the, but there were a lot of factories around in Andheri area and this thing so he used to always go take inspiration from whatever technology he could and yeah he used some jogart to every stage of his life to find solution to unique challenges that we had and that's why we were able to scale up. So that was the initial challenge like how do we meet the demand of the customers and being a frozen product you had to ensure that the ice cream consistency remains the same throughout its shelf life. What wonderful jogart he has. So over the years how have you connected good consumers? I mean word of mouth was one of them. Yeah. What end? See for us you know the only avenue was our stores you know to connect with our customers like you know because we didn't have any marketing budget or where we wanted to spread awareness so and luckily what happened was the word of mouth publicity worked very well for us so we had celebrities coming into our stores so that acted itself like a mini celibhunt like you know people used to like you know they know they can naturalize. So that was the first initial boost that we got like you know from the customer and of course the product spoke for itself and you know we didn't have to you know release multiple ads or create awareness our customers just spread the word for us. Please tell us about your most popular advertising campaigns in recent years. Yeah so interestingly I at the most the one that I can recall is the one that when we were opening in Delhi we had a nice build up you know towards creating the hype like you know we didn't straight away announce that we are opening. So just maybe one or two months back before opening first store in Delhi we had wrapped up the entire store and you know this is around 2014 so you know the social media was already at peak you know the influencer marketing was already at peak so a lot of the influencers and we didn't have to engage them they self you know they were able to promote okay I think that shows us coming to Delhi that created a lot of hype and banking on that you know we then when we released the DEAD next day when our opening day it sort of matched you know the hype and the opening date sort of met and you know that gave us amazing response like you know we were we touched one million sales in less than seven days so it was a record for us for that type. That's great. So which ad agency do you work with and what was your expenditure before the pandemic and what is now? So we work with a very it's a boutique ad agency called Drinkwaters they are also based out of Bombay. The great thing about them is like you know it's a small team of four to five individuals with the bus experience by themselves they also started their journey with us so it's been a close association with them and you know for us the marketing budget we roughly you know we try to have it less than two or three percent of our annual turnover. Pandemic yes did hit us badly so you know that time because you know like I said our stores were the way of communication to you know communicating our whatever story or our philosophy to the customers that was obviously hampered because you know there were restrictions in opening hours we were not allowed to open in certain pockets of India where you know where the cases were rising. So that you know and we took a austerity call to cut off you know our budgets but post second phase once it did we resumed our robot activities that we were doing like what you know in fact we increased our spends on communicating the product actors like you know the safety of the product because there was misconception around whether ice cream is you know can be not not suitable for doing the covid times because it's you know it's a cold product so we had to create awareness around that we have to build awareness that you know ice cream is perfectly fine we make it in a safe environment hygienic environment so that was the bunch of the marketing budget went and creating those you know those are vendors. We see a lot many ice cream brands in the market at present so many national international ones yeah do you see as your biggest competitor? Well you know I think you know earlier there was a time when you know we used to say Baskin Robbins, Amul they were the biggest competitors because they also operated in a similar format like in the parlor format like you know like we have we have only have exclusive parlor format we don't sell in mom and pop shows or any supermarkets so we used to see any ice cream brand that into parlor format is a competitor but that has changed drastically over the last two years because not just because of the pandemic but also because the rise of Swiggy, Zomato, the online aggregators we've seen a lot of boutique stores opening not necessarily having ice cream parlor of their own maybe operating to dark kitchen or cloud kitchens I'd say call it and it's like the small brands now opening in each pocket of every corners and every area so it's a very interesting time where you know we are facing competition not from big brands but smaller new brands that are coming up in the market. So are you planning to change your marketing strategy as you mentioned you operate only through the parlors so are you planning to you know keep your products in in malls yeah so the first step has been we already took last year which is like you know unfortunately what had happened was that while we were allowed to manufacture ice cream we were not allowed to sell ice creams because ice cream parlor people thought it's a restaurant right so restaurants were almost you know they were hit hard because of they were not allowed to walk in customers were not allowed you're not allowed to sell customers directly so we had to sell we had to find some way out so we tied up for the first time with cloud kitchen partners like right now we are tied up with rebel foods which are you know the the recently they also became a unicorn where they operate from cloud kitchens all over India so that's what the first step that was something very new for us we we had to take this step otherwise you know we would have been lost amongst the customer like people would not recall us but when things we and we didn't frankly no one would have anticipated how long it's going to be how things are going to be back to normal so that was the first format and yes though we are not looking at hypermarket or supermarkets right now but we are definitely looking at other online avenues could it could be like you know like Swiggy has come up with Insamart, Dunzo has their own you know grocery and ice cream and food related so we are looking at tying up with those travel so our reach increases we are not just only dependent to sell our ice creams to our own stores but we have other videos to sell our products. What are your long-term plans Srinivas? So I would say first thing first you know the one important lesson that we have learned is to how we mitigate our risk you know in times like this you know we cannot just be only dependent on operating only through our follow format we have to look at the avenues so which is we are actively looking. Second is to increase our footprints across you know all over India right now we are heavily concentrated in western and southern region we though we have stores in Delhi but we are not even penetrated you know 75% of India so that we want to increase our footprint but that mitigates the risk suppose if there is a curfew or lockdown in one part of India we are not suffered you know if it's not like you know in this case Aydarabad was not affected but Kerala was very badly affected so we could survive because in Aydarabad market was relatively open so that way we've learned our lessons so we want to increase our footprint that that's the second part and third we want to work on our backend channel very important because it's not just us the manufacturer of ice creams and you know sellers of ice cream are affected even our supply chain our supply partners our vendors are equally affected so we want to work very closely with the partners to ensure that you know there is whatever type of challenging time we are able to get those raw materials and you know we can cater to the demand what's there in the market. Any plans to go global? Not yet but you know as they say never say never so right now we like I said we're not even penetrated 75% of the market so our whole and sole focus is right now expanding in India as much as we can and though we have tremendous demand we on a daily basis we get hundreds of queries you know from Dubai, Singapore, America, US, England so but yeah we are quite sure that you know we want to increase our footprints in India in fact right now we are at 138 outlets as we speak our plan is to double that count within the next two to three years. Thanks for taking time out and speaking with us in the media. Thanks and take care. Bye.