Successful, naturally!

Sidhant Kamath, the younger son of Mulky Raghunandan Srinivas Kamath, who founded the ice-cream brand Natural in 1984, sits with us as we talk with his father in his cabin. Sometime during the conversation, Sidhant starts talking about the food cooked by his grandmother. He hadn’t been fortunate enough to taste it; she had passed away before his birth. But he knows all the ingredients that she used in her cooking. He talks about some of her Mangalorean recipes in intricate detail—like the jackfruit payasam or the muskmelon-milk-poha drink made during Diwali. He looks at his father—sitting across the table—and then looks at me and winks. “It is mouth-watering for him even now,” he jokes.

Kamath, who cannot resist the temptation to talk about his mother’s food, takes the bait. As a child, he says, he wondered how the flavour of each and every ingredient in his mom’s cooking worked so well. Slowly, he became aware of the combinations of fruits that could work with milk. Being the son of a fruit vendor (primarily mangoes), Kamath was also intrigued by fruits and their flavours. “Accompanying my father, I learned early on in life to identify the right fruits and the accurate ripeness that are required to make ice-cream,” he says.

Kamath started with five to six flavours including custard apple, mango, malai and watermelon. After a few years, coming up with more became a necessity when people in Mumbai started copying his flavours. “Shops with similar names were coming up in the vicinity,” says Sidhant. “We needed to up our game and introduce unique flavours.” Tender coconut, kala jamun, jackfruit and a few other flavours were launched by 1986. “By the 1990s, we had 15 to 17 flavours,” he says.

Some flavours like custard apple were tougher to make than the others. “It is easy to extract the pulp from mango but not from custard apple,” says Kamath. His mother deseeded almost 2.5kg of custard apple pulp every day in the beginning. But he needed to find an easier alternative. His mother’s homely technique—of removing stones from rice by swirling it in water—came in handy. “Using the same technique of centrifugal force, we created an equipment to de-seed the custard apple pulp,” says Sidhant.

Kamath, 63, had come to Mumbai in 1969 as a schoolboy from a small village called Mulki in Mangalore, Karnataka. One of his elder brothers had already moved to Mumbai a few years earlier and had invited the other family members to join him. He continued his schooling in Mumbai for three to four years while his brothers opened an eatery—Gokul Refreshments—in 1970 in Santacruz. Kamath flunked his SSC exams and decided to drop out. “It is because of that that I have trouble speaking in English,” he says. He joined his brothers in the business in 1974-75. Delicacies like dosa, pav bhaji, samosa and pakode were being served along with home-made ice-cream at the eatery. Kamath’s heart was in ice-cream, but he was the youngest sibling and a bit timid. “I knew no one would take me seriously,” he says. So, he waited.

Ready, set, go: workers at the natural factory in kandivali | Amey Mansabdar

In 1983, when the family split because of some differences, he knew it was time to pursue his dream. While working at the eatery, he used to deliver ice-cream at wedding receptions. “Most orders came from Juhu Scheme, Napean Sea Road and Pali Hill,” he recollects. He knew that these were the places where his business would grow. “There were few takers for ice-cream in those days,” he says. “Getting a shop in Juhu Scheme was tricky, but it was possible to get one close by, in Juhu Village, almost opposite Amitabh’s [Bachchan] bungalow.” He located a shop in the area. He had Rs 35,000 with him, and setting up the business required Rs 3.5 lakh. “I went to my elder brother,” he says. “He was happy that I was thinking about my own business. He asked me the amount I needed. I feared if I quoted a large sum, I would lose the amount that I could easily get from him.” He asked for a lakh and managed to raise the rest from friends and other siblings.

The concept of a solo ice-cream boutique was new. The fear of failure made him hesitant. “Chandan Talkies was nearby,” he says. “I knew people would come to my shop after watching a film but would they come just for ice-cream?” On February 14, 1984, Natural Ice Cream of Juhu Village opened its doors. On the first day, the Juhu outlet sold 14kg of ice-cream and Kamath made Rs 1,400. Now, on any given Sunday, the Juhu outlet alone sells approximately 600kg and makes around Rs 2,00,000.

Initially, the shop sold pav bhaji in addition to ice-cream. He and his newly-married wife, Annapurna, worked hard to make the venture a success. In the beginning, people came for ice-cream but later, the sale of pav bhaji picked up and that of ice-cream lagged. Since his initial idea was to promote fruit ice-cream instead of fruit-flavoured ice-cream, he stopped selling pav bhaji, despite getting brickbats from his regulars. But, eventually, the gamble paid off. At the end of the second year, Kamath’s turnover was Rs 14 lakh and it kept growing.

In 1993, Kamath hit a roadblock while filing income tax returns, owing to the large sales. That’s when he decided to open a private limited company and opt for the franchise model. Thus, Kamaths Ourtimes Ice Cream Pvt. Ltd. came into existence. Five stores opened in Mumbai. “Over the years, regulars got an idea about what a Natural ice-cream tasted like,” says Kamath. “They look for the same taste at the outlets in various cities. We want to deliver that without any compromise.”

For that they had to come up with better facilities. They started at Juhu, moved to Veera Desai and then, to Mira Road. Currently, they have 140 people working in a fully equipped, state-of-the-art plant spread across 25,000 square feet in Charkop, Kandivali West. They have also bought two adjoining plots to expand it further. Another five-acre plant set up in Mangalore last year is meant only for fruit processing. The brand produces around 6.5 tonnes of ice-cream every day.

Kamath claims that all over the world, they are the only ones making ice-cream with only three ingredients. They have also avoided using techniques like aging or air-pumping to retain the traditional flavour. That is also the reason why they have been buying milk from the same vendor all these years, who now has dairy farms at three locations in and around Mumbai. Now, the team is focusing on rebuilding the brand and Srinivas, Kamath’s elder son and a law graduate, is in charge of it. “When I entered the business in 2010, I looked at it as a critic,” he says. “I used to question the services we provided, the ambience... I thought I could look at the brand-building aspect and that’s how the idea of rebranding came up.”

The Kamaths already have 125 stores across cities like Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru, Delhi, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Indore, Kochi and Goa. They are planning to expand to Kolkata by next month and Tamil Nadu by next year. They are sure their ice-cream will be a success there, too. Naturally.