Ajoy Misra, Managing Director & CEO of Tata Global Beverages, is reluctant to enter the tea and coffee capsule segment in India. This is despite having acquired an Australian brand called Map, which has products in this category.

While the largest tea company is staying away from entering a new segment, a young start-up – Indulge Beverages – has taken upon itself the onus of creating and building the hot beverage capsule segment.

Similarly, Global Consumer Products, a year-old company started by A Mahendran, former Managing Director & CEO of Godrej Consumer Products, has recently launched its chocolate brand LuvIt targeted at 15-30 year olds. Mahendran has plans to get into more new categories like fat-free chips.

These examples point to the increasing number of food & beverage start-ups taking the risk of entering untapped segments where the bigger FMCG players have stayed away.

“Agility is lost when you are part of a big fat FMCG company. We are a synthetic start-up as we have capital adequacy and flexibility to launch new products which are not ‘Me Too’ and have not been tried by the large FMCG companies,’’ said Mahendran, Chairman & Managing Director, Global Consumer Products, which has received $50 million from Goldman Sachs and Mitsui Global.

Most of the new start-ups have been launched by former FMCG executives who have worked in big companies such as Coca-Cola, Godrej Consumer Products and PepsiCo.

“We can afford to be more nimble than the regular FMCG companies who take more time to innovate with products and typically like to take fewer risks. We already have seed capital of $2 million available to experiment and create brands in new categories like tea and coffee capsules,’’ says Tuhin Jain, Co-Founder, Indulge Beverages, who earlier worked with PepsiCo.

Armed with new and innovative product ideas, these start-ups seem to have easy access to funds.

Hector Beverages, for example, raised $20 million from Sequoia Capital and Catamaran Ventures and set up its second manufacturing facility. The company, started by former Coca-Cola employees, has made it big with Paper Boat brand, with juice flavours such as aam panna and sattu .

“We are the first beverage brand to launch drinks which are close to nature using traditional recipes. Today, we are well funded and can experiment with new offerings and packaging with our Paper Boat brand,’’ says Neeraj Kakkar, Founder & CEO, Hector Beverages.

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