How Sweet Karam Coffee Grew To ₹46 Cr By Turning Regional Snacks Into Daily Repeat

India’s organised F&B players have long overlooked the demand for traditional snacks and sweets from southern regions. For pan-India consumers, this often means limited options. They can either buy mass-produced items that lack the authentic flavours or look for niche outlets that deliver on taste but struggle with consistency and reach.

India’s homegrown confectionery and snacks market was valued at $23.67 Bn in 2025 and is projected to grow at a 6.31% CAGR through 2030, driven by both everyday consumption and seasonal indulgence. Yet even as the category expands, FMCG majors have largely stayed away from scaling South Indian meetha and namkeen brands nationally.

Founded in 2015, Sweet Karam Coffee set out to scale South Indian meetha and namkeen using family recipes built for consistent, large-batch production. The brand is inspired by “Janaki paati” (Tamil for grandmother), the founding team’s 82-year-old grandmother and its ‘chief recipe officer’. 

It was launched by husband-wife duo Nalini Parthiban and Anand Bharadwaj, along with their cousins Veera Raghavan and Srivatsan Sundararaman. Together, they industrialised these home-style recipes without losing the texture, flavour, or kitchen-grade ingredients that define traditional South Indian snacks.

The brand offers more than 150 SKUs across three core snacking and sweets categories. Its most popular products include Madras Mixture, Andhra Spicy Murukku, Banana Chips and Ghee Mysore Pak.

Preserving Home-Style Cooking At Scale

Instead of competing on convenience or price, the D2C brand positioned itself as a unified South Indian food brand. Its products are designed as everyday food built for repeat consumption.

The brand’s differentiation lies in how ingredients are selected and the food is prepared. It avoids palm oil, refined flour and preservatives, relying instead on natural ingredients characteristic of traditional South Indian cooking.

Recreating home-style taste at scale, however, requires culinary discipline and standardisation without sliding into industrial shortcuts. To achieve this, it works with exclusive third-party partners across Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala, preserving regional spice balance and cooking methods while supporting growth.

Repeat Consumption As The Growth Engine

The primary growth driver has been repeat consumption, fuelled by consumer trust in ingredient quality and taste consistency. The product-market fit is evident, as the brand maintains a repeat customer rate of around 45% and a diverse SKU mix rather than a single hero product.

The brand remained bootstrapped until 2023, building scale through its D2C channels, word of mouth and a fast-growing community of repeat consumers. In 2023, Fireside Ventures invested in the startup, enabling faster distribution. A 2025 Series A round led by Peak XV further accelerated this momentum.

In FY25, the brand recorded INR 46 Cr in revenue, a 307% year-on-year jump from INR 11.3 Cr. 

By December 2025, Sweet Karam Coffee crossed the INR 100 Cr revenue mark and is on track to close FY26 with a topline of INR 150 Cr. 

So far, it has served 19 Lakh+ consumers and fulfilled more than 60 Lakh orders.

This growth has been driven by an omnichannel strategy, with marketplaces and quick commerce accounting for roughly 55% of sales, D2C contributing 35%, and offline retail accounting for the remaining 10%.

Winning A Global Market With Regional Recipes

In the next 12-18 months, the D2C brand plans to expand beyond southern markets, introduce healthier and functional snack variants, and strengthen its offline distribution footprint. In the near term, it is targeting INR 300 Cr in revenue.

Over the next three to five years, it aims to emerge as a global South Indian food brand and scale to INR 500 Cr, while preserving the home-style taste and ingredient integrity that sit at the core of its identity.

[Authored By Anirudh Trivedi]

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