Rohan Mirchandani – Building A Healthy India

Just like the success stories of all the big brands, Epigamia too has an intriguing story behind its origin. Before earning the reputation of being the first Indian Greek yoghurt brand, Epigamia saw its own fair share of struggles in the past.  

However, with the success of the brand, over the time, its founder Rohan Mirchandani has certainly inspired several young entrepreneurs across the world to execute their business ideas in the growing Indian start-up ecology!

In this blog, we will talk about the journey of Rohan Mirchandani to success.

Firstly, we’ll begin with discussing the early life of Rohan.

Who is he?

Rohan Mirchandani is one of the most successful and well-educated Indian entrepreneurs who has revolutionized the FMCG industry. He is the CEO and Co-founder of the Drums Food International Pvt Ltd, the maker of Epigamia. Born in 1982, Rohan grew up in New Jersey, USA. He completed his education at NYU Florence, Italy, where he discovered his passion for wine while exploring the quaint city of Tuscany. He received a Bachelor’s degree in Finance and International Business from NYU’s Stern School of Business.

The Success you know, the story you don’t

Rohan began his professional career with Standard & Poor’s Corporate Valuation Group, where he spent time in Tokyo working on one of the largest merger and acquisition transactions in history. Later, he went on to join his family-owned company, the Ross Group, where was in charge of rebranding the logistics division. From working with big corporations to helping his family in running their family business, Rohan clearly gained a lot of experience in the business sector even before the launch of Epigamia.

Before joining the MBA course in Wharton, Pennsylvania, Rohan came to India to visit his friends and family in 2009 and that’s when he first met chef Ganesh Krishnamoorthy, who had started a hobby ice cream business. Intrigued by the concept, Rohan, a self-proclaimed foodie, also decided to invest in Ganesh’s venture.

In December 2011, Rohan spent a week in Mumbai for a course on marketing. During his course, he met Shripad Nadkarni, former Head of Marketing at Coca Cola and the founder of a marketing consulting firm, MarketGate. When Rohan shared his idea of building ice cream parlours all over in India with Shripad, he suggested him to take the route of Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG). Impressed with Shripad’s advice, Rohan Mirchandani, at the age of 30, left everything behind in USA and returned to India in 2013, to completely focus on his dream project. For this, Rohan even convinced Ganesh Krishnamoorthy to join him and started building the FMCG plan for Hokey Pokey.

Within months of launching the ice creams, the team realized there were several limitations to the product. After all, ice creams are extremely seasonal.

After understanding all the pros and cons of ice cream business, Mirchandani came up with an idea of launching a Greek yogurt brand Epigamia in 2015 as a complementary product to ice creams.

Though Hockey Pockey was gaining momentum at that time, with around 1,200 outlets selling about 50,000 litres of ice cream a month, Rohan was still not satisfied with the company, as it was not growing faster.

Building Epigamia

With the launch of Epigamia, the team realised that the brand could become larger than Hokey Pokey.

Interestingly, Epigamia saw sales of 10,000 cups in the first month of its launch. In the beginning, it was launched with the flavours including, mango, strawberry, etc., consisting all the natural ingredients sourced locally.

Using the traditional Greek straining process, the company created a much healthier and tastier version of yoghurts, enrich with proteins. Over the time, the brand has successfully made a mark for itself in the market. As a result, Rohan decided to stop retailing Hokey Pokey products after a while and shifted his focus towards Epigamia only.

Since it’s launch, Epigamia has introduced several preservative-free products, including Greek Yogurt Smoothies, lactose-free variants of curd, and the recently-added plant-based range.

Things took a turn for better when Epigamia raised Series A funding of $6.6M from DSG Consumer Partners and Verlinvest in 2016. Since then, the company has had multiple rounds of funding, with famous Bollywood actress Deepika Padukone’s KA Enterprises also invested in the brand.

Secret behind Epigamia’s success

With innovation acting as its fuel, Epigamia is constantly pushing its boundaries by crafting contemporary versions of the traditional foods and this could be a major reason behind their success. So far, the company has 14,000 offline stores in 30 plus cities across India and they are aiming to reach up to 35,000 offline stores in 50 cities in the next two years. Not only this, they are selling their products through e-commerce platforms as well such as BigBasket and Amazon, and retail chains like Godrej Natures Basket, Future Group, Reliance Retail, D-Mart.