Arvind Dadu of Anand Sweets on building a modern mithai brand
The managing director of Anand Sweets & Savouries talks about making ‘mithai’ cool, his initial reluctance to join the family business, and being able to take criticism
It is probably the most flavour-packed building in Jigani, an industrial area on the outskirts of Bengaluru populated by chemical plants, hardware manufacturing facilities and printing presses. You don’t quite expect to find a place that churns out kaju katlis, motichoor laddoos and baklava in the heart of this strictly unromantic neighbourhood, but Anand Sweets’ presence here is not accidental. It was in 2009 that the Bengaluru-based company, which makes mithai, snacks, savouries, and runs restaurants and airport retail stores, decided to move to a central manufacturing facility.
“It was an unusual move, because back then most mithai shops did everything on the same premises, making mithai and namkeens in a backroom and selling them in the front of the store," says Arvind Dadu, 44, managing director of Anand Sweets & Savouries, the family-owned company started by his father Anand in 1988 and now run by him and his brothers Ankeet and Ankush.
Dadu is showing me around the 300,000 sq. ft facility that churns out around 15,000kg of sweets and snacks every day. “As we were expanding the number of outlets, we decided to move everything to a central place to maintain hygiene and quality standards… to make sure that any bite of Mysore pak from any of our stores would taste the same."
After wearing shoe covers and hair nets, we walk into the ground floor section of the factory, which finally looks like a traditional mithai shop(floor). The smell of boiling milk and ghee hangs heavy in the warm air, and large steel tables line the cavernous space. But there is order in this chaos, Dadu says. “Each section is dedicated to one particular process or product, so like here," he points, “you have the khoya-making, in the next you’ll find sugar syrup being made, and then the assembling stations on the other end of the room." At one such station, piping hot, bright orange globules of besan are being shaped by hand into motichoor ladoos—one of the brand’s biggest-selling products. The worker making them puts them into small cupcake liners (how they are sold) and hands us a few to taste—I am not a big fan of the mithai, but this hits different. On another floor, we see the ‘Indian bakery’ section where fresh cakes, cookies, biscottis, and kharis—all part of the brand’s offerings—are being whisked out of the oven, while a room next door is dedicated to making namkeens.
Back in Dadu’s office in a small building on the factory premises, we talk about Anand Sweets’ journey from one 1,000 sq. ft outlet in Bengaluru’s Commercial Street to this facility—and alongside, the brand’s growth to 15 company-owned stores, 11 restaurants, airport retail stores at domestic and international terminals in Kochi, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad and Port Blair, along with quick commerce platforms and a national online retail presence through its website.
Data from market intelligence platform Tracxn indicates that the company generated a revenue of ₹349 crore for the financial year ended 31 March 2025, and Dadu, though he doesn’t reveal revenue numbers, says the company is growing at a rate of 30% year on year. Speculative valuations peg the company’s worth at over ₹500 crore, though this could not be independently verified by Mint.
More than hard numbers, though, Anand Sweets’ success rests on being part of a cultural shift in the Indian mithai market—it is certainly the biggest player in the modern mithai space in Bengaluru, marked by attractive packaging and inviting stores.
Interestingly, its evolution is connected in intrinsic ways to the growth of the city. Today the brand is well-known, among other things, for the way it reimagined mithai packaging, making it durable and premium-looking, featuring Indian motifs associated with royalty and grandeur, all of which makes its products extremely giftable. “We had noticed that people would take mithai out of the boxes before serving them because most of the older kind of packaging was flimsy and basic. We wanted our boxes to be placed on the table...for people to show them off," says Dadu. “Traditionally, factory and shop owners in Bengaluru would give employees sweet boxes on Ayudha Puja (the ninth day of Navratri). The focus was on cost-effectiveness rather than quality or packaging. Then, in the 1990s, with the IT boom, Diwali gifting started becoming big in the city," recalls Dadu. With that, the demand for pretty mithai boxes started rising, and Anand, which had three outlets by then and had already been paying some attention to branding and packaging, was in the right place to be seen as more than a mithai shop.
Around the same time, there was a marked rise in footfall at what was then Bengaluru’s only airport—a small airport operated by Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL)—where Anand had a store. With more domestic and international travellers, the demand for giftable sweets rose. “Suddenly, we started seeing a huge demand for Mysore pak. We realised that it is seen as less perishable than other Indian sweets, and travellers wanted to carry something typical of Bangalore. We started sampling Mysore pak at the airport—and sales took off like anything," says Dadu, laughing.
The push to make its products look premium came from Dadu, and he admits there was some initial resistance from his father. Anand Dadu was still very much in charge of the company he had built up from a single store in 1988 after migrating from Hyderabad and working at a mithai shop—Arya Bhavan in the city’s Majestic area—as a sales person for over a decade.
Arvind Dadu, after completing his schooling in the city, went to the University of Sheffield in 1998 to study business management. He admits that he had no wish to come back and work in his family’s mithai business. “In those days, you know what dads were like—if there was a school holiday, he would tell us brothers ‘why are you sitting here? Go to the store, go to the factory.’ So I felt that if I stayed here, all my college life I’d just be doing this. I’ll not be able to enjoy, have a good time. So I escaped at the first chance and went to the UK, fully intending to settle down there," says Dadu.
But by the time he graduated, 9/11 happened and he found that he couldn’t land a job in the UK. He came back and did, ultimately, join the family business, taking charge of the newly opened Koramangala store. It turned out to be fortuitous—because apart from pushing for new things like an increased focus on marketing, branding and design, he also started developing new products and product categories, such as introducing a chaat counter in the store. A few years down the line, when online delivery platforms started operating and Koramangala became not only a startup hub but also a laboratory for e-commerce innovation, it helped that Anand was right there and had great recall among startup founders.
“We were the third brand to join Swiggy," says Dadu, talking about how the brand embraced e-commerce. Swiggy was also born in Koramangala and its founders were literally going door to door in the neighbourhood trying to onboard restaurants.
Today, 30-35% of Anand’s revenue comes from digital platforms. During the pandemic, it partnered with cloud kitchen operators Rebel Foods to expand its online reach, leveraging Rebel Foods’ food-tech network to offer its products to a wider audience. The brand has constantly expanded its repertoire—it started selling baklavas after Dadu visited West Asia in 2014 and noticed how similar-but-different it was to Indian sweets. Today, a Syrian baklava maker presides over its baklava station back at the Jigani factory. It recently launched a brand of packaged snacks called Chak Now, targeted at a younger audience with fun, pop-art style packaging. “Every six months, you’ll see something new in our stores—a new product, a new category, new packaging—and that’s what has kept us on our toes and, I would say, made us the most innovative company in our space," says Dadu.
His father and he are passionate about cricket, and one of the things he wants to create a legacy in is supporting grassroots level cricket in Karnataka. The company sponsors several coaching camps and tournaments.
The brand has had its share of challenges as well. Last year, it came under intense social media scrutiny when an Instagram story by a customer went viral. The customer alleged that she was being snooped on and filmed on a mobile phone at one of the company’s restaurants in Bengaluru—and that she did not get adequate support from the company’s employees when she tried to get the offender apprehended. The company had issued a clarification denying this at the time and said that the complaint had been taken seriously.
“It was a very unfortunate incident," says Dadu. “We had some construction work going on in the building, and there was scaffolding outside. One of the restrooms had a window, and the lady saw a man trying to peep in. The store manager accompanied her to the police station and the man was caught and put behind bars," says Dadu. The brand came under heavy criticism on social media in the following weeks, he says, a sobering thing for a company that had, so far, not seen much controversy. “It made us take the safety of our customers far more seriously. And it showed us that social media can make or break reputations."
The company has ambitious expansion plans in the coming years and is looking to invest around ₹300 crore into this. “We want to have 70 stores by 2030 and be the dominant player in south India...establish our presence all over Karnataka and in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra, and then move on to Maharashtra and Goa," reveals Dadu. “We have been profitable from Day One, that has always been the culture."
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