The House of Khodays is more than a century old, one would expect it to be among the leading companies in its space.

But its glory days are behind now even though one of its brands, Khodays Rum, is still a best-seller. The Khodays, however, want to pick themselves up from where they left off a few decades ago.

Brand revival

“We want to revive our brands, compete with the best out there,” said Satpal Chaudhury, COO of Khoday India, who cut his teeth in the liquor industry with Manu Chhabria’s Shaw Wallace, where he looked after the beer division.

Khodays has seen its heydays, particularly during the 1970s and ’80s, when Vittal Mallya’s UB Group was trying to gain a foothold. The story goes that when his son, Vijay Mallya, sent his executives with a request to bottle some of their brands, the Khodays sent them back saying they would not allow even one unit to be bottled there.

Today, the ₹590-crore Khoday Group is known more for giving away parcels of land to real estate developers than for liquor, while the UB Group has been split into smaller ones and given away to multinationals such as Diageo and Heineken.

Chaudhury believes the Khoday’s latest brand, its super premium Peter Scot Black single malt premium whiskey, priced at around ₹4,300 for a 750 ml bottle in Karnataka, will catapult the company back to its glory days.

And the company doesn’t bank much on marketing. “We believe word of mouth is a far more effective marketing tool than spending lakhs on peddling the brand,” Chaudhury said. In India, the marketing spend of liquor companies — all through surrogate advertising — is extremely low, at about ₹200 crore, as liquor advertising is banned.

But the liquor industry itself is growing at a healthy rate of 8.9 per cent and its market size is about $35 billion, the third largest in the world.

There are only four companies which make single malt in India — Khodays, Amrut Distillery, John Distillers and Radico Khaitan. Whiskey made from just one distillery is generally referred to as ‘single malt’.

Game changer

L Swamy Khoday, an executive director with Khoday India, said Peter Scot Black Single Malt will be a game changer for the company, “putting us back in the reckoning for premium Indian spirits.”

This confidence stems from the fact that single malt as a category has recorded 200 per cent growth over the past few years. Also, within a month of its launch, Peter Scot topped the list of best domestic brands in the whiskey category this year, according to trade publication Spiritz . The Khodays expect to sell about 10,000 cases of the single malt by 2020 with a 10 per cent market share.

The project to launch the company’s first single malt was started in 2008 by the then chairman Srihari Khoday. After his recent demise, his brother Swamy Khoday took up the task. The single malt is produced at the company’s plant here.

The listed Khoday India posted a turnover of ₹140 crore for FY18 and recorded a marginal loss.

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