Premium dough

An Australian cookie brand takes a bigger bite of India

John Lynch remembers his friends laugh at him when he opened the first Cookie Man store at Chennai's Spencer Plaza in 2000 to sell the premium Australian cookie brand.

"Cookies for Chennai? they cackled," he recalls. Four years and 20 stores later, Lynch, director and chief cookie taster of Cookie Man, is having the last laugh. The brand has generated a revenue of Rs 3 crore and the next year's target is Rs 9 crore.

The three-fold increase is expected to come from the brand's growing presence in India's shopping malls as well as from supplying the product to airlines and five-star hotels. That's not all.

Cookie Man now plans to enter Singapore and the Gulf, and Paracore, John Lynch's private equity investment company in India that runs the 50:50 joint venture with the Australian cookie company, has the mandate to tap these markets.

It is not difficult to see why Peter Alligette, the promoter of the Cookie Man brand, wants to use India as the springboard. In terms of volume sales, Cookie Man's Chennai outlet beat Australia's best-selling store (it has 45 in the country) this year having sold 25 lakh cookies.

Back home, two Cookie Man outlets have come up in Gurgaon (Metropolitan mall) and Mumbai (Inorbit mall) in the last six months. A new store is expected at GVK, the 7 lakh square foot mall coming up in Hyderabad. Prasad Mall in Hyderabad and Forum in Bangalore already have small outlets.

For a product that costs Rs 360 a kilo, the growth rate is not bad, feels Lynch, the American national who set up base in India 10 years ago.

"We've created the premium cookies category India," he claims, adding that the product is not replacing the biscuit market but creating its own niche. Cookie Man managed to break in as Indians have a tradition of offering and eating biscuits with tea, he believes.

Besides Cookie Man is like the home-made stuff freshly baked in front of the customers.

To be sure, there's more to Lynch than just selling cookies. His investment company, run with the Indian partner V Ravindran, was responsible for bringing in the Australian beer brand Forster's to India earlier.

"We wanted to build a success story in the food and beverages business," he says adding "I've seen the India market change from scarcity to abundance, from unbranded to branded."

Some years ago, Paracore acquired a controlling stake in the travel company PL Worldways. Today, the company has nine branches and generates a ticketing revenue of Rs 120 crore and foreign exchange worth Rs 50 crore. "It has been a particularly good year for the luxury travel business which has grown by 100 per cent," he says.

But being an investor, won't the former Ernst & Young employee sell off his businesses for a price and return to the US? "I am part of the 56 per cent Americans who're divorced so I'm free to live wherever I want," he says.

Also, the last 10 years in India were slow and he expects the business to pick up in the next 10 years. "So we have reasons to stay. Besides we are long term investors especially in businesses where we have a majority stake," he adds.

There is no immediate threat on the horizon for the Cookie Man business either. Branded biscuits in India cater to a different market segment while the quality of cookies in local bakeries leaves much to be desired, he feels.

Till other premium cookie brands such as Mrs Fields in the US and Millie's in the UK come to India, Lynch may just bite deeper into the biscuit-eating nation.