As exciting as food sounds to be, it is undoubtedly one of the toughest businesses in India.
Having worked with over 40+ brands, here are our reasons:
❌ 1. Indian Consumer Environment
🔹 Indians flirt with food 4 times a day.
🔹Home-cooked food has a strong perception of being healthy.
🔹Fresh = healthy for Indians.
🔹The taste profile in India changes every 50 km!
🔹Supply chain is still a challenging part of the business.
🔹Retail environments are super complex.
❌2. Confused Entrepreneurs
There are 2 types of business- Scale Business v/s Lifestyle Business
Not all entrepreneurs can run lifestyle businesses, not all entrepreneurs are meant for scale. But first, they need to define and understand what “scale” means to them.
🔹1. How big do you want your biz to be?
🔹2. How big should the top line be?
🔹3. How big the brand value should be?
Let’s say, a celebrity wants to do a food business.
As a public figure or celebrity; around 30-40% of your time will be dedicated to building & maintaining your public image! The rest of the time you would have to build and run your biz.
Hence the strength of celebrities lies in building lifestyle brands that can connect with their core TG!
They aren’t meant for volume-driven and scale businesses.
❌3. (Mis)Understanding the Culture
Entrepreneurs fantasize about unique product-market fit and forget to question the relevancy of their products for Indian consumers.
Before even conducting a product market fit exercise- you need to understand how and what India eats.
Indians are still eating how they ate 50 years ago and this won’t change for another 50 years as well.
This is exactly the reason why gummies as a category are not adopted as widely as other formats in the nutraceuticals space – because gummies (like chewing gum) require efforts of chewing!
And Indians don’t like to chew!
❌4.Early Majority>> Early Adopters
Food entrepreneurs stretch product innovations very far.
Their product ideas are inspired by their travel experiences or some personal health triggers! In either case, they miss out on building relevant products for the vast majority.
We say that innovation for the sake of innovation is not innovation.
Thanks to social media; entrepreneurs rush to make Instagrammable products to grab early eyeballs.
They even succeed in doing so and can please the Early Adopters or Innovators- which are the most flirtatious ones.
They aren’t loyalists.
Loyalty and scale come from serving the Early Majority. They are your real consumers. They will spend, they will care, they will give feedback and they will come back again if great value is delivered.
So try to build a product not for the consumers of Bandra or South Bombay but for the consumers of Andheri East and Thane!