How did ID fresh get to ₹500 Cr revenue?
India's "batter king" - 18 years in making.
The ID Fresh Food Story✨
ID Fresh Foods has become India’s ultimate batter king which is doing ~₹500 Crores in revenue and is valued at ~₹3,000 Crores. The company makes roughly 20 Lakh Idlis & 14 Lakh dosas in a single day. So how is an 18-year-old brand giving FMCG giants like Haldirams, MTR & Nestle a run for their money?
Let’s find out—
But first, how did it start?
ID Fresh Foods started in 2006 — a time when India’s GDP per capita was almost 1/3rd of what it is today at ~$800. There was a transition happening from home-made products to packaged products. Be it Dahi, pickles, noodles or even atta — India was moving to packaged goods.
This is a time when ITC was the leader in the “ready to cook space” and had already launched Aashirvaad Atta in 2002. This was when market was flooded with unbranded batters — the ones that are super cheap & super unhealthy. This gap became an opportunity for Musthafa & his cousins.
What did ID fresh foods get right?
Trust-building 101.
The secret to cracking trust in a food market is delivering the highest quality. Simple. But it’s easier said than done. The company makes batters with 0 chemicals & preservatives. So how does this work?
By sticking to only 3 ingredients — dal, rice & fenugreek. The idea is simple: Better Ingredients are more important than Better Shelf-life for ID. People started loving the batters because dosa/idlis are the staple family breakfast in the South. But this quality obsession led to slow SKU expansion. In 18 years, they’ve entered just ~15 categories. For context, ITC has 99+ SKUs in the ready-to-cook category alone. Fun fact: ID’s transparency is reflected in their factory video 👇
“offline” first innovation.
The company is present in 45+ cities with roughly 40,000 stores and has even reached countries like UAE & the US. Still, 70% of their sales are offline. But offline is hard in FMCG and even harder in “low shelf-life” products. But despite that ID’s wastage is at 2% while the industry average is 20%.
That’s core to how they built the no inventory & daily replenishment Model. Look, a typical batter-making process has 5 steps — cleaning & washing, soaking & grinding, mixing, fermentation, and packaging. If you do all of these steps every day, you’d lose out on the freshness till the stuff reaches the kirana shop. And voila! this is where they got creative and created a same-day delivery model and stuck to the principle of holding ZERO inventories.
They solved this by forecasting demand using data & taking procurement & supply calls accordingly. Plus, keeping the “fermentation” step to happen in the cold-storage trucks when they are transporting it to retail stories. So when the truck reaches the Kirana shop, the batter is as fresh as it can be. Smart, right?
Solid communication on product.
The company has a unique to way interact with their ideal customers. They go “out-of-the-box” & don’t attempt to do what’s already been done by big FMCG boys with deeper pockets.
No celebrities for their campaigns & emphasise families in ads.
They set up 37 trust shops in COVID — regular vending machines with no cashier or UPI but a piggy bank box outside. The logic of the campaign? “We completely trust our customers”
They even started van deliveries in COVID, going to 40+ locations in Mumbai to deliver their customers’ favorite breakfast snacks in touch times as well.
Understand pain-points → Solve elegantly → Build trust → word-of-mouth
The utility packaging.
For example - they launched a squeeze vada batter packaging that makes it easy for customers to give vada a “Donut” shape in seconds. Even launched a creative “real” coconut packaging for their grated coconut. It does two things -
Stand out on the super market shelves.
Be top of the mind with pure product usage method improvements.
That’s not all, we have an episode of GrowthX Wireframe, where we cover the ID Fresh Food insights in depth — it’s a must watch.
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Is daily replenishment model can also work in tier 2 or 3 cities ?