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Divya Trivedi

Mumbai, Sept. 18 Premium ice-cream retailer Baskin Robbins is looking at business to business tie-ups with international and domestic children’s films, to leverage the mutual benefits of branding, Mr Pankaj Chaturvedi, Chief Executive Officer, told Business Line.

The decision follows the American chain’s successful co-branding association with Spiderman 3 and Coca-Cola, respectively, earlier this year.

“We have tasted success at each of our combined branding exercises and are willing to enter more partnerships of this nature. Targeting kids, our association with Spiderman increased footfalls and we did four times the business in that particular month,” he said.

Free comics were given out with each scoop and the Spiderman brand name used in television commercials on kids’ channels. The company was in talks with Hanuman, but the film’s delayed release brought the talks to a standstill.

Baskin Robbins operates 240 outlets in 52 cities and is expected to reach 300 outlets by December.

Thereafter, the company will roll 100 outlets per year. It is looking for a cluster presence in various cities, including tier-II and III, because of the business opportunities in smaller towns, “Our store at Shillong does greater business than the one in Juhu, Mumbai,” he explained.

Baskin Robbins standalone stores are more profitable than its kiosks in malls, according to Mr Chaturvedi.

“We get more footfalls in our kiosks in malls, but on a percentage basis, our standalone stores do better business. Buying from malls is the manifestation of impulse buying while that from stores is destination buying,” he said.

“Our experience has been that fruit and nut flavours are extremely popular with Indians,” he said, adding that the company plans to get into regular research and development programmes with its customers to customise its offerings.

Compared to the global consumption of ice-creams at one litre per year per capita consumption, the Indian consumption is negligible at 150 ml per year per capita consumption.

Apart from the regional ice-cream vendors, cafés offering a wide variety of food products are its main competitors, he said. Baskin Robbins recently launched lounge format outlets and runs one in Bangalore and six in Hyderabad. Each lounge outlet calls for an investment of Rs 25-30 lakh compared with Rs 12 lakh for a standalone store or Rs 7 lakh for a kiosk.

The company recorded a turnover of Rs 42 crore in the previous fiscal and expects to garner a turnover of Rs 50 crore in the current fiscal.

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