Home-grown brand, iD Fresh Food has ended FY21 with ₹294 crore in revenue, up from ₹238 crore in FY20, registering a 23.5 per cent increase. Musthafa PC, co-founder and CEO, said a good January-March quarter has given him the confidence of ending this fiscal with ₹500-crore revenue.

For the first time in the company’s history, Malabar Parotas emerged the top selling product in FY21, beating the best-selling Idli-Dosa batter by 2 percentage points in revenue contribution. Paneer, curd, chappati and coffee were the other top sellers last fiscal.

Batter factory

iD Fresh launched the world's largest batter factory in Anekal on the outskirts of Bengaluru on March 30, which is celebrated as World Idli Day, at an investment of ₹40 crore. The factory has a capacity to make batter for 24 lakh idlis/per day and 3 lakh parotas/per day. Plans are on to invest ₹100 crore this fiscal, in setting up three new factories at Delhi, Hyderabad and the US.

Impact of pandemic

“When the pandemic struck last March, leading to a national lockdown and creating major issues around supply chain and availability of labour, we decided to focus on key essential products and cut down our offering from 20 SKUs to 8 SKUs. We also cut down markets like Madurai, Thirvananthapuram and Kozikode that were not doing well and focussed on key markets of Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune and Dubai with our key products. We withdrew our organic product range, which we had launched in March 2019 and products like grated coconut and tender coconut which were launched in 2020 and vada batter too. Our B2B business from the HORECA (hotel, restaurant, catering) segment, which contributed to 12 per cent of our revenue, was badly affected. However, our B2C retail business grew 40 per cent in FY21. While the first two quarters were really bad for business, we exited March with a revenue run rate of ₹376 crore. This is giving us the confidence to target ₹500 crore in revenue this fiscal,” said Musthafa.

He attributed this confidence to the company’s good performance in the January – March quarter, the anticipated return of many of its customers who are working from home in their hometowns to office in the metros in June/July and the recovery of the HORECA segment. The company has re-launched vada batter and will follow this up with the re-launch of its other products as well.

Asked about its flanker brand Daileez which was launched for traditionally price sensitive markets in June 2019, Musthafa said, the brand had to be withdrawn. The company’s products are available in 23,000 retail outlets in 35 cities in India, UAE, Oman and in the US.

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