1.Please give us a brief overview about your company.
Storia Foods & Beverages Pvt. Ltd. is a young and disruptive food and beverage brand with a robust R&D driven product portfolio, and a vision to deliver products with superior health benefits, offering unique flavors and richer taste. We have envisioned to drive innovation across major food and beverage categories with products that will help to build a nutritionally stronger nation and work towards adding ease, creating value and inspiring a healthier lifestyle.
Launched in April 2017, Storia® finds its roots in celebrating togetherness that brings joy through food and stories. Built by a strong professional leadership team with extensive experience in large MNCs and domestic brands, Storia® is present across 33+ cities in India across 50,000+ retail outlets.
In 2018, Storia® bagged the ‘The Economic Times Promising Brands 2018’ award in the Food and Beverage category by the forum.
2.What are the ranges of product you are dealing in India?
Storia’s® product portfolio is designed to revive the art of living a healthier lifestyle and creating memorable stories at affordable price points. Our product portfolio comprises of shakes, coconut water, street style drinks and beverage whitener.
Storia shakes are available in 9 lip-smacking flavours which includes Mango, Banana and Strawberry being the “Highest fruit content shakes in India’ and ‘India’s frost Elaichi Chai shake”. They are a healthier beverage option, with natural fruits, reduced sugar as compared to most beverage offerings currently in the market and are trans fat free making it a healthier alternative to flavoured milk.
We also have coconut water and beverage whitener in our product portfolio to nurture a fit and healthy lifestyle in India. The coconut water contains only 19 calories and 0% fat per serving of 100ml with high electrolytes, potassium and calcium. It is prepared by extracting fresh tender coconut water from the richest belts of the country and packed, with love, to make it convenient and available all year round. The beverage whitener is a healthier substitute for milk, with the goodness of proteins and calcium and with no trans fat. It also the best alternative remedy for controlling BP & cholesterol.
Available in aseptic brick packs and Aseptic PET bottles, the products are packed at its absolute best at much lower temperatures to minimize the nutritional losses and retain most of the flavours and fragrances from its natural ingredients. They are also shelf stable, with a shelf life of over 6 months, with no refrigeration needed. All our products are free of preservatives and additives making them 100% natural with superior health benefits.
Apart from crafting India’s highest fruit content shakes, we have reinforced the Storia® product portfolio with the recently launched street style drinks in 8 delectable flavours. Inspired by the flavours of the street, we have innovated and crafted some unique yet healthy combinations like Tomato pepper, green mango masala, pani puri, etc which contain the goodness of fruits and the zing of spices.
3.What are your predictions about the growth of the food industry over the next few years and how you see the demand for your products?
The Indian food industry has witnessed an exceptional growth and continues to expand at a fast pace. This can be attributed to a high percentage of working and young population with rising disposable incomes. Also, the demand for healthy food has been increased with millennials progressively getting mindful of the geniuses appended to being healthy. Every segment in the industry is innovating with state-of-the-art-technology or breaking the barrier of traditional notion connected with a particular food/beverage such as tea or local flavoured juices. For the investors, this trend might help to accelerate and grow soon making it a lucrative sector to invest in. The food processing business in India has seen tons of investment from international markets in the recent years.
With a surge in demand for healthier beverages, and Storia’s® vision of disrupting the industry with products that are convenient, lip smacking and inspire a healthier life style, we are excited to see how the future pans out for us. With some categories already growing over 100% over last year and customer feedbacks on the products, that are unique in its offerings and at affordable price points, the demand for the products is on a rise.
4.Please give us a brief about your sales network in India & abroad? Are you also selling your products online?
At present, we are focusing on expanding our reach and shelf space. We have 2 robust sales channels with one covering Traditional trade and the other covering Alternate channels that include Modern Trade, Institutions likes schools, colleges, corporates and hospitals, and HORECA. Currently, Storia® has its footprint across 33+ cities in India with 50,000+ retail outlets.
Our Modern trade associations include Godrej Nature’s Basket, ABRL’s More, Spencers and a few of regional modern trade accounts. We are also available online in select cities with Big Basket.
5.The food and beverage sector is highly regulated and faces unique challenges, not the least of which is related to quality & hygiene. How you are committed towards manufacturing hygienically best products?
At Storia, we feel great responsibility towards our consumers because what we serve affects their health and lives directly. We have an unwavering commitment to follow international quality standards. Our manufacturing partners are Food Safety System Certification (FSSC) 22000 complient and apply Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) principles to ensure safety and maintain high quality products for consumers. We are Star K-Kosher certified, and Halal certified from MUI (The Indonesian council of Ulama- Halal). Our company adheres to stringent hygienic standards & strict quality control procedures implemented and audited regularly, at various stages of processing to ensure best quality product for consumers. The manufacturing plant has an in-house laboratory facility which is equipped with highly sophisticated instruments to check the quality of product at every stage of processing. We follow a validated and approved testing methods given by national and international standard bodies to release the product for distribution.
6.It is said that ‘Product packaging works as a silent salesman’. Please share something about your product packaging and how innovative they are?
No advertising speaks louder than the product packaging itself when it comes to impulse buying categories like ours. We understand this at the outset and hence take this very seriously. We have exclusive agency partners who work on designing the bottles and another agency partner who work on the creatives and art work on it. Each category is designed to be a ‘poster’ by itself where they can stand out on the shelves by themselves to our consumers. Each category has a communication and each product within that has a different selling story on the packaging itself.
The shakes are designed keeping in mind the iconic milk bottles, have minimal elements to communicate purity and are clutter free, while the street style drinks depict the street on the bottles with water coloured walls to bring in the vibrancy of Indian streets. Coconut water is designed to depict purity and the richness of the belts from which they are sourced from India.
7.What would you consider to be the major milestones achieved by your company? And what are your company’s future plans?
To breaking the technical and price point barriers and being able to create a product with the highest fruit content was one of our first major milestones. This did not only include innovation at a product level but also on the technology front which gave us immense satisfaction and confidence in our vision of serving the consumers with innovative, healthy products.
The turning point for Storia was when we sold a million bottles of our Shakes, in our first month alone. That was the moment when we felt we are here for the long haul. Since then, we’ve received tremendous support from our consumers to take the products across the country and give us shelf space in the highly competitive beverage market. We have a coverage of more than 50,000 outlets, since the launch and are looking to penetrate deeper in the coming years.
We now have a vision to be available across 1 lac outlets in the country and then eventually be present across 1 lac outlets for shakes and drinks individually in India. We also aspire to become globally available with our unique offerings and set footprints on an Indian food and beverage company on the global stage. We at Storia celebrate the bond of togetherness through the emotions of food and stories. For us food is much more than a means to sustain life. It is a means of creating bonds, it is a means of sharing and creating moments together. For us, success doesn’t lie only in numbers. It lies in seeing the smile on our consumers’ face when they consume Storia, when they hear about Storia, when they call it their brand.
