Indian healthfood brand Yoga Bar has earmarked an investment of ₹25 crore in a new 60,000 sq ft manufacturing facility in Tumkur, Karnataka, to cater to growing demand for its products after the outbreak of the pandemic. The manufacturing facility which is expected to be operational in 3-4 months will be staffed by up to 100 people and will augment its existing 20,000 sq ft manufacturing facility in Bengaluru. Primarily, an offline brand pre-pandemic, Yoga Bar pivoted to online sales overnight and is currently on track to exit FY22 with revenue of ₹130 crore, up from ₹50 crore in FY21 a top executive told BusinessLine .

“We were primarily an offline brand available in 10,000 retail outlets across the top 10 cities and therefore got very badly hit after the outbreak of Covid-19. Nearly 90 per cent of our business came from offline sales and the rest from Amazon, BigBasket and Flipkart. We had a 90-strong sales team to service all these stores. We had to change the DNA of the company and hire people to drive our online sales, which worked out very well for us, as our online business grew by 500 per cent - our entire revenue in the last couple of months has been from online sales only” Suhasini Sampath co-founder, Yoga Bar, said.

Yoga Bar’s product portfolio is priced from ₹40 to ₹270 for snack bars, oats, peanut butters and muesli. With the lockdown restrictions easing down across States, Suhasini expects sales to settle down at 75 per cent from offline and 25 per cent from online. “Our product proposition is to deliver 100 per cent natural products that are 70-80 per cent better than the top FMCG brands and priced at 10 per cent less. Indian customers are very discerning today and associate our brand with 100 per cent natural ingredients, therefore, we have only grown by the strength of our products and till recently did not even have a marketing team. Till now, the number listed on the product packaging is my number, which customers can call for any query/problem that they have,” she said.

Currently, at a revenue run rate of ₹7-crore/month, Yoga Bar is on track to exceed ₹100 crore revenue to hit ₹130 crore in FY22. The brand plans to tap into the growing demand for multigrain and whole grain snacks with a new range of extruded snack foods in the coming months. The brand which is backed by Saif Partners and Fireside Ventures has received inbound requests to export its products and has raised ₹78 crore in venture funding since its inception in 2014.

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