Bengaluru-based The Good Craft Co. Flavour Lab, a Diageo India initiative, is an experimental lab that acts as a boot camp for aspiring alco-bev start-ups. Following this set-up opened on September 21, 2024, The Good Craft Co. Experience Home & Flavour Market, Ponda Distillery, Goa, will open in December 2025.
“The Good Craft Co is a venture conceived to create an amplification platform to put Indian craft spirits on the global map. This is important because India has a strong and rich culture, heritage, and diversity of distillation techniques and processes which build styles characteristic of every region in the country,” Vikram Damodaran, Chief Innovation Officer at Diageo India told businessline.
Established in 2022 under Diageo India, The Good Craft Co. aims to foster an ecosystem of start-ups across the Indian spirits industry. The company said this to be its first global initiative to build a direct-to-consumer (DTC) experiential ecosystem to educate, advocate, and appreciate the community of craft spirits and its makers.
“We want to create spirits of exceptional value and artisanship like some good single malt whiskies that came out recently, Godawan being one. We also intend to stretch the boundaries and invest to nurture the ecosystem itself. When you look at our strategy in Diageo, it’s not just about producing organic craft spirits, but also about investing,” Damodaran said.
- Also read: Delta’s new R&D facility will power its local, global manufacturing, says MD Niranjan Nayak
In 2017, Diageo India revived its Ponda distillery in Goa which now houses a 6KLPD distillery with about 25,000 casks in maturation. The company also created a spirit dedicated to artisanal Indian craftsmanship and heritage called Godawan Single Malt, while kickstarting initiatives around Diageo Ventures in India – an investment wing for alco-bev startups.
Diageo India has launched a series of craft spirits over the last three years. Starting with Epitome Reserve – a limited-batch, collector’s edition that brought two different expressions, followed by Godawan, the artisanal single malt from Rajasthan.
Alongside, Diageo Ventures in India has invested in four brands, NAO Spirits (Of Greater Than and Hāpusa Indian Gin fame), Maya Pistola Agavepura (the makers of Pistola, an Indian-born agave spirit), zero-alcohol spirit distiller V9 Beverages, and cold-brew coffee liqueur producers Indie Brew and Spirits. The investments give the brands access to lab facilities that aid innovation, research, and development.
He added that the company is open to nurturing anybody from the ecosystem, despite whether it has invested in them or not. These companies usually approach Diageo India early on in their product development lifecycle for feedback in terms of sensory performance, or a process change to help tweak a particular aromatic compound among others.
“We give feedback across categories - not just for spirits, but even to companies working on ready-to-drink components. The idea is to let people know of a place that is a great resource of both capital and intellectual infrastructure. Once they know of a reliable source, it automatically generates a belief there is a larger strategic value in partnering with a company like Diageo.”
He explained that a small company is usually strapped for capital because commercializing a product is expensive. A startup must focus on seeing returns on investments as opposed to plugging more infrastructure to stabilize its research capability.
“One big asset a startup will see in a facility like this is access to capital and intellectual infrastructure. For example, If I want to do a chromatography experiment and understand my compounds, we can run an experiment in 24 hours and get results. To invest in equipment on your own, hire somebody who knows how to use it, run, and maintain is painstaking and expensive. So this center can be a one-stop shop.”
He added the facility, a non-paid model similar to incubators and accelerators in the tech world, intends to work with startups, fermenters, consumers, mixologists, and people in the industry.
The center’s four engagement zones include the Academy where visitors see the processes that form the backbone of distillation; DIAGEO India’s R&D Labs, like the Separation, Incubation, and Molecular Lab, along with the bar & fermentary with a tasting of never-before-seen or released samples of rums, whiskies, and other aged, dark spirits housed from The Flavour Lab’s vault.
On the other hand, the Good Craft Co. Experience Home & Flavour Market will offer a visual journey of craft, a distillery tour, a microbrewery experience, artisanal processes, and collaborations with Indian and Global spirit makers, accompanied by tasting experiences.