Veeba - the ₹1000 Cr. sauce company🥫
Or maybe more than a Sauce company.
But before we get into that, I have an update for you.
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Now coming back to Veeba. Well, who would’ve thought that you could make ₹1,000 crores revenue by making mayonnaise and sauces? Well, Veeba did. In roughly 10 years, the company has a 50% market share in the sauce, mayonnaise, & dip market (non-ketchup). So let’s dive into saucy insights—
But first, what’s cooking in this space?
You can break down the entire sauce market into 2 parts— ketchup and the dips & mayonnaise market. Both add up to a ₹5,000 crore market as per Viraj. In the ketchup market, the big boys — Kissan & Maggi control 90% of the market. On the dips and mayonnaise side, Veeba & Fun Foods dominate with an 80% share. Btw, Fun Foods was earlier owned by Viraj’s father, Rajiv Bahl, until they sold it off to Dr. Oetker in 2008.
This rise is apparent with the high urbanization rate we’ve been witnessing— 21% to 36% in the last 50 years. People are getting more aware of different palettes and are trying to replicate the taste in their homes.
What did Veeba crack then?
The B2B first insight.
The company always wanted to be a retail giant. But B2C is brutal. You need solid distribution across all channels. Rajiv’s hack for this? Targeting B2B first. He saw that the country was on a QSR bull run and started targeting QSR giants and hotels. Started with Dominos and later bagged all the BIG clients that you could think of – Starbucks, Burger King, KFC, Pizza Hut, CCD & PVR, etc.
B2B had 3 major benefits:
Consistent cashflow for running factories and work & paying salaries.
Raising quality bar while dealing with high standards of QSRs.
Indirectly gauging consumer preference with the type of sauces and volumes ordered by QSRs.
Product & FMCG Strategy.
Veeba didn’t want to be a “me-too” sauce. They wanted to create unique stuff — products that were different in flavors from competitors and appeared a little aspirational. They know that there is no “one-size-fits-all” in the world of sauces. Right now they have 80+ SKUs and 12 Categories. But what is the bigger plan? To become a FMCG beast.
The company wants to be a “House Of Brands”, currently having 3 more brands apart from Veeba:
Earth Made- a coconut water
Benne Tebbi- a mocktail syrup
Tasty Pixel- seasonings, ice cream toppings, syrups, and sauces (exclusively for the B2B service)
Tier 2 before top metros.
They make 70% of their revenues from general trade (your next-door Kirana shops). But bigger distribution requires bigger capital. How do you make sure you spread to 700 cities so fast? Their trick was simple: Enter bordering cities like Chandigarh, Ludhiana, & Noida before entering the top metros like Delhi. Shopkeepers turned out to be more welcoming for them in these cities. Start with smaller markets and crush sales there first. The flywheel is simple—
That’s not all, we launched a new episode of GrowthX Wireframe, where we cover the VEEBA story in depth
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