“Pure & Sure aims to educate & build trust through its experiential retail format”

Speaking to Retail4Growth, Surya Shastry, MD at Phalada Organic Consumer Products Pvt Ltd, talks about the brand’s plan to open Pure & Sure Café & Store in more cities and also explore emerging locations like Mysore, Coimbatore, and Nagpur, as the brand is seeing a meaningful uptick in consumption in these cities.  

Pure & Sure, a certified organic food brand with a legacy of over 25 years in organic farming and supply chain expertise, recently relaunched its café & store in Jayanagar, Bangalore, to elevate the brand’s reach and create an experiential space to educate & connect with the customer. With the intent of spreading the brand message ‘Everyday Food, Made Good’, the Pure & Sure café & store brings together the brand’s extensive range of organic groceries, farm-to-table café offering, Sweetwise guilt-free ice cream parlour, along with community engagement & events. Currently, the brand operates two cafés & store locations in Bengaluru - Jayanagar & Vajarahalli, with plans to expand to other cities soon.

Strengthening the brand’s farm-to-fork philosophy, Surya Shastry, MD at Phalada Organic Consumer Products Pvt Ltd, who also serves as an Expert Advisor with the FSSAI, shares more about the brand’s experience at retail and how it aims to contribute towards advancing the organic standards in the country.

Can you tell us a little about the brand and how it all began?

My father started the business in 1999, with a focus on export, as there was a strong demand for organic products in the US and Europe. So we started working with our own network of farmers, got them certified under organic standards, guided them and bought produce from them. I joined the company in 2008 and spent about two years as a management trainee to understand various aspects of the business. In late 2011, I started Pure & Sure, as it was the right time for us to enter this space. Over the years, we expanded our product portfolio while also expanding our distribution.

As a pan-India brand with distribution across 20 states, a major chunk of our business comes from the metros. If I were to break it down geographically, the South is our biggest market, followed by the West, the North, and then the East.

What prompted you to open an exclusive brand café & store?

We had a wide portfolio of products that were available online, but only 20-30 products would reach physical retail. That’s when we thought of opening a store to showcase the entire range. And with this the café concept also came into the picture, where we wanted an open kitchen concept that allows customers to see the ingredients used and how food is prepared. With this, people get to taste a lot of different dishes, try out different products, and leading to more sales.

Initially, we planned to open 4 stores, and the first one launched in Jayanagar in March 2019. Within four months, we signed in another location and opened in Indiranagar.

Due to COVID, the entire plan was derailed. We couldn't sustain, so we shut the second outlet and only had Jayanagar, because it had a bit of bandwidth and footfalls that came in immediately when the lockdown was over.

Recently, we shifted and opened this new space, and it has been received very well.

What was the main objective of launching this café & store format?

One of the key reasons for having a physical space is to host more interactive sessions with consumers, to take a moment and explain what we do and why it matters. Not every event is specifically about organic, as they sit within the broader theme of healthy eating. Since reopening about two months ago, we've already hosted three to four events.

Over the last year, we've been heavily focused on building the education around organic products. Not built on fear, but on helping people genuinely understand what organic means. So we run a lot of community outreach programmes.

One of them is something we call a factory visit, where they spend a day with me. I walk them through the entire operation: what we do, why we do it, and why it matters in the context of organic. When most people think of organic, they think only about the farming. They assume it just means growing without chemicals. But there's an equal amount of work that happens post-harvest as well. So processing and storage require just as much care — and that's something a lot of people don't realise.

Tell us how this café & store concept has helped the brand.

So this place is more experiential, where people browse the entire range and understand the offering. But what we've noticed is that they often come to discover the brand and then purchase through whichever channel they prefer. When we first opened in Jayanagar, a lot of nearby retailers were worried we'd eat into their business.

But the opposite happened, our sales in the area actually increased. Of course, many people still buy here directly, but driving sales isn't really the primary objective of this space.

What’s the need of the hour in terms of educating customers about organic products at retail?

Trust remains one of the biggest challenges in the organic industry. Consumers consistently doubt whether products are genuinely organic. Currently, there are two government-approved organic standards in India, each with its own logo, plus a logo from the third-party certifying body. The unified government logo, Jai Vik Bharat, is meant to serve as the overarching assurance of certified organic status, but most consumers are unaware of what any of these logos mean, and the government hasn't done enough to build that awareness.

India's organic standard is actually among the best in the world, but without stronger enforcement, better consumer education, and tighter regulation around labelling and trademarks, the category's rapid growth risks outpacing the integrity of the certification system itself.

Are you planning to launch more stores in this format?

Definitely. The plan is to take this format beyond Bangalore. In terms of scale, we'd be looking at around 4 to 5 stores per city, depending on the size of the city.

We're also exploring emerging cities like Mysore, Coimbatore, and Nagpur, as we're seeing a meaningful uptick in consumption there. It's still not significantly large, but there's good traction building up.

In fact, a solid chunk of our D2C website business already comes from these smaller cities, largely because they don't have easy access to these products through physical retail. So that's an encouraging signal for us as we think about expanding there.