Keventers – Whipping Up Its Overseas Expansion Plans

It would be interesting to know the history of the brand, which was established in 1895.

Edward Keventers, a British citizen, founded the brand in India with the idea of bringing dairy technology to India by setting up the first plant in Aligarh. Much later, in 1940s, the affluent Dalmia family brought the brand and went on to acquire the largest consumer chain as well as a broad network of about 130 distributors for the next 20 years. In 1960, their major plant shut down, giving way to the closure of the brand. However, for the next 55 years, the franchisees clung on to the brand name and many of them continued to do business, while in reality, none of them was part of the brand. The trademark remained with the Dalmia family and I went onboard to start Keventers once again only recently, in 2015.

How did you perceive your retail expansion then and how has it evolved over the years?

We started with a single outlet in Delhi’s popular mall Select Citywalk and we achieved exponential growth in terms of popularity and business. Since valuation was the key to wealth creation, aggressive expansion was our principal mission. In the next year, we decided to grow our store network through a combination of Company-owned (CoCo), franchisee and Joint Venture (JV) modes. Amongst all these channels, franchisee doesn’t really give us high turnover and we use JV mainly for big markets outside Delhi. Today, we have about 270 outlets across 40 cities in India along with the UAE and Nepal.

What are your growth plans? Which markets are you targeting?

We are looking at 1000 outlets within next 3 years. As for channels, the vision is to have 35% CoCo outlets, 10% JV and rest franchisee rollout. We are soon entering overseas tropical markets such as Kenya. We will be on the lookout for other tropical locations across Southeast Asia before we eye a market like the USA. It requires profound understanding and research and hence is part of our long-term goal.

Are you looking at innovating your store formats?

Currently, most of our outlets are located in malls. We will soon be looking at outlets in SIS formats or setting up POS in places like institutes, corporate parks and others. We are also working on even smaller outlet spaces on carts.

Do you have plans to embark on FMCG or other categories?

We have already started our app-based milk delivery business. We are currently working on ice-cream segment with a different brand name, which will hit both FMCG and QSR spaces.