The vice-chairperson of Bisleri International Pvt. Ltd has also set a target to more than double the company’s revenue to ₹5,000 crore by 2025, from just over ₹2,300 crore in FY23.

In an interview on Wednesday, JRC, as she is popularly known within the company, said she is supercharging the 54-year-old brand to appeal to Gen-Z consumers, stepping up manufacturing to expand its footprint to reach more consumers, and grab a larger share of the $8.5 billion carbonated soft drinks (CSD) market.

Chauhan, who has been part of Bisleri for the last 14 years, agreed that earlier, she was “a little bit restricted”, but now, she is involved in “pretty much everything”. It was her first media interaction since the cessation of talks between Bisleri International and Tata Consumer Products Ltd (TCPL).

In March, TCPL informed exchanges about the end of its negotiations to buy Bisleri, stating that it had not entered into a definitive agreement or binding commitment with the company. According to an Economic Times report in November, TCPL was in talks to buy the packaged water brand for ₹6,000-7,000 crore.

On Wednesday, Chauhan said the decision to grow the Business organically was firmed up just before the onset of the pandemic; however, execution was speeded up over the last 12 months.

The decision to not sell the business to TCPL was “mutual”, she said. “A lot of people approached us; we wanted to hear them out to see what could be done, or what different routes could be taken. But I must admit, most of those meetings were done by my father and I was probably in only one or two of them because I was busy working,” Chauhan said.

She added that nobody in the company wanted to sell the business. “Everyone was quite happy with the way business was, and now, we have a vision of being a ₹5,000 crore company by 2025,” she said.

“We have an excellent team of directors, CEOs, professionals, who I am very comfortable working with and who are great at guiding me, who listen and take feedback when I have something to say; when I have a vision, they help me achieve that vision. So, there is no stress as such, in fact, on me personally, in the business, and I have been working in this business for roughly around 14 years now,” Chauhan added.

Bisleri was founded by Italian entrepreneur Signor Felice Bisleri in 1969, and the brand was acquired in India by Jayanti’s father Ramesh Chauhan for ₹4 lakh in the same year. Today, it has 128 operational plants in India which are either directly owned by the company or by co-packers, and a network of nearly 6,000 distributors.

Bisleri, which launched its carbonated soft drinks (CSD) portfolio in 2016, expanded the business last month, hiring actors on streaming platforms to back new product launches such as Bisleri Pop, Bisleri Rev cola, and Bisleri Spyci Jeera.

“Most of the projects that we’re doing have been developed in-house. For example, CSD has been developed in-house; we did not use any sort of agency or anything like that. Our own team developed each of these flavours,” she said.

Chauhan expects the CSD business to touch ₹500 crore over the next four years. “Even if we get a minor percentage of the market, it would make it a couple of 100 crore business. We can make it a ₹500 crore business, over the next four years or so, even if we get like 1 or 2% market share, which is pretty big to start with,” she said.

Chauhan expects new products to contribute about 10% of the company’s business with the rest coming from Bisleri.

Bisleri is also increasing its investments in manufacturing, along with its co-packers. “What we are doing is scaling up our capacities to meet the demand in the market. We are helping our co-packers and franchisees. All the manufacturing units have been scaled up in order to have faster and newer machinery,” she said. Chauhan said the focus is to drive growth in urban markets. “The urban market is pretty big; there are 8,000 towns and right now, we are focusing on distributing in all of these towns. We are not present everywhere, yet. So, we have to really focus on our distribution network, and scale up our manufacturing for CSD,” she said.

Chauhan said categories such as water and soft drinks have ample headroom for growth in urban markets, giving the company scope to penetrate further. More recently, it launched a campaign for brand Bisleri which Chauhan said is targeted at younger consumers.

Meanwhile, the company has no immediate plans to enter into niche segments like vitamin waters or energy drinks. “It’s a difficult market to get into and the amount that you can sell is very limited. Whereas mass products give you an opportunity to be able to distribute your products to all sorts of markets,” she said.

Recently, the company signed a manufacturing and bottling tie-up with diversified Dubai-based Nasser Abdulla Lootah group, marking its first international expansion. “In a couple of months, Bisleri will be available in Dubai, which I’m super-excited about. Currently, they will be producing Bisleri in their facility near Dubai and hopefully, a year or two later, we will be sending Vedica, our single-source natural spring water to the market,” she said.

Updated: 07 Jun 2023, 11:52 PM IST