Mumbai: Renowned Marathi writer P.L. Deshpande had once remarked in his usual satirical style that “even if Dagdusheth Ganapati came to Chitale Bandhu store at 2 pm, the owners will ask the god to come back after 4 pm”. The reference was to the Hindu god Ganesh visiting Pune’s popular 75-year-old snack shop Chitale Bandhu.
The store had been the cause of many a joke for its afternoon siesta hours, when it would down the shutters between 1 pm and 4 pm. The strict siesta is also what made Chitale Bandhu synonymous with Pune’s identity of the retiree haven that it once was.
Over the years, Pune has changed, metamorphosing from a small sleepy town to an industrial and IT powerhouse in Maharashtra. Over the years, Chitale Bandhu has also changed. No longer does the store sleep between 1 pm and 4 pm.
But, what hasn’t changed is that the brand, now 75 years old, is still synonymous with the city’s culture, and remains most famous for its crunchy bakarwadi and mango barfi.
Chitale Bandhu is a family-run company that is into the business of milk and milk products as well as sweet and savoury items. It started off in Pune but now has stores across India and the world.
“Thanks to the milk business, we were able to get into the households of Punekars every morning. Operational efficiency was hardly our forte at that time (in the 1950s) and keeping the store closed between 1 pm and 4 pm was a very Puneri thing to do,” Indraneel Chitale, managing partner of Chitale Bandhu, told ThePrint.
A small business that started off with the selling of milk, the company has for the last 6-7 years been growing at an average CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 24 percent, according to Indraneel. Last year, it teamed up with cricket maestro Sachin Tendulkar as its brand ambassador.
“We are competing at a national level against the likes of Balaji, Bikaner, Haldiram (popular food chains) in this category. So, to standout, we have to look at gaining market share rather than competing with them at a price point level. And so, we are diversifying and also investing now on expanding into the health and nutrition segment,” said Indraneel.
He said that by 2035, the Indian salty snack market will be worth over Rs 1.30 lakh crore and his company was gearing up to get at least 10 percent of the market share.
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How it all started
Bandhu means brother and, as the name suggests, Chitale Bandhu was set up by two brothers.
It all started in 1939 for the Chitales, when Bhaskar Chitale, a farmer from the Sangli district of Maharashtra, started selling milk products under the brand name of BG Chitale dairy. He would sell milk and milk products like curd and chakka through the railways to different retailers in Mumbai.
But, taking the business of selling milk, a perishable product, beyond Mumbai and Pune was a difficult job from remote Sangli.
So, Bhaskar asked his son Raghunathrao, who worked in a mill in Gujarat’s Surat, to move to Mumbai and get into the business. Later, Bhaskar’s other son Narsimharao also joined the business in the city.
In the mid-1940s, Raghunathrao and Narsimharao moved to Pune to grow the business. This is when the brothers decided to start making some of their own milk products.
In August 1950, they opened the first Chitale Bandhu store in Pune’s Kunte Chowk. Here, they produced and sold khoa or condensed milk, a primer for sweets, and this is how the Chitale Bandhu store came into being.
The second store was opened in Deccan Gymkhana in Pune, where it still continues to exist, said Indraneel.
As the business was growing, the company wanted to diversify from milk products. And in the mid-70s it introduced its star product, Bakarwadi (a savoury snack). Though Bakarwadi is originally a Gujarati product, the Chitales “Maharashtrianised” it.
Over the years, the Chitale Bandhu Bakarwadi has become so popular that now the company produces 2,500 kg of it per hour from a mere 300 kg per day at the start, said Indraneel.
Between the mid-70s and 80s, Indraneel’s father and uncles came to join the business.
“During that time, we digitised the store (with magnetic ID), the earlier version of RFID, and that is when my uncles and father realised that they do not really have to sit in the store and man it. We could franchise it as well,” said Indraneel.
In 1989, the first Chitale Bandhu franchise store was set up. By the end of the 20th century, there were 10 franchises, he said.
Venturing out
Demand for its products was increasing. That is when automation came into the picture at Chitale Bandhu. With this, the scale of production increased and the Chitales started looking at newer markets.
The company decided to venture out of the country to tap into the diaspora. There was an IT boom and many from Pune’s IT industry were migrating abroad for jobs in the early 2000s. The Chitales decided to take the plunge and give the NRIs a sweet and crunchy slice of home.
In 2004, the company started exporting its products to the US, UAE and Singapore. Currently, Chitale Bandhu exports to 65 countries across all continents, said Indraneel.
He joined the business in 2011 and currently looks after the diversification of the portfolio of the company into other healthy snacks and sweets.
The company now has a total of 150 stores across the world. These are of different sizes: the Chitale Bandhu stores that are full-fledged shops, Chitale Bandhu express stores and Chitale Bandhu kiosks. It also has 3 lakh retail distribution centres across India with presence in over 12 states. The company plans to have 10 lakh distribution centres in the next five years, according to Indraneel.
There are two subsidiary companies as well, Chitale Americas and Chitale Bandhu Australia, which work in tandem with local superstores.
2014 was a watershed year for the Chitales. This was when they decided to do away with the “Shut from 1pm-4 pm” boards outside their stores in Pune.
“With the cosmopolitan crowd that was coming into the city as it was transforming into an IT hub, we realised that they were not attuned to the Pune culture and we had to adapt ourselves to suit them,” said Indraneel.
“Also, when we were going out of the city and state, we realised that we were not the preferred brand. So we had to make more marketing-driven efforts,” he added.
The association with Tendulkar has helped as the company realised the need for a connection with consumers. “How we stay connected with the consumers and have them pick our packet, this is where the marketing comes into play,” said Indraneel.
The Chitale women
Indraneel is Bhaskar’s great grandson. His great-grandmother or Bhaskar’s wife was an educated woman who had completed matriculation studies back in the 1930s and came from a family that ran a newspaper.
“She had political acumen and was ahead of her time. So, when she realised her sons would be in the business together, she made it a rule that they should not be living together,” said Indraneel.
“Thus, independence at the family level, despite it being a family empire, was designed into the business,” he said.
Later, both grandmothers of Indraneel helped their husbands by visiting the store factories, attending labour union meetings, and setting up traditional Maharashtrian recipes like rava, besan and dink ladoos for production.
“All these recipes were set up by my grandmother,” he told ThePrint.
About 200 women work at the Chitale plant as of now, which is taken care of by Indraneel’s mother. His sister, who joined the company in 2019, looks after the IT part of the business.
“As a company, we have come to realise that the majority of our consumers and opinion-makers are women. So women do play a very big role in our company,” he said.
Speaking at the 75th celebration event of Chitale Bandhu in Pune earlier this month, Tendulkar had said: “This is a big family and their strength lies in the family. This morning when I met them, I was told that it will just be a celebration with family members, and they are about 100 members.”
“But I hope they grow from 100 to many and the brand keeps growing,” he added.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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