Renewing sweet tidings

Renewing sweet tidings
Not for them the visage of simplicity. Anand Sweets consciously tries to not look like a traditional sweet shop with ‘swanky’ offerings, as the owners tell Sowmya Rajaram & Khushali P Madhwani

M odernity, or an attempt at it, is writ large over the Anand Sweets brand. The first thing you notice at the Commercial Street store is the ceiling — designed in a chandelier-like fashion, with glass and decorative spikes jutting out of it. Boxes of fancily-packaged sweets line the walls — which are tiled bright golden — grab attention. The brand may have had a fledgling debut in 1988 under Anand Dayal Dadu, who ventured out on his own after 14 years with Arya Bhavan Sweets at Majestic, but it is now taking a decidedly ‘with-it’ approach to the sweetmeat business.
It’s all thanks to the stewardship of one of the sons, Arvind (his brother handles the accounts while his sister has stared Cheeni Kum—a farsan store), says his father Dadu, who is Managing Partner today. As we chat in his large office just down the road, Dadu, dressed in a brown shirt and formal pants, tells us how he was only concerned with the quality of the sweets and the production line. “It was run like a halwai-business,” says Arvind, betraying his initial distaste for his father’s business. Growing up, he wasn’t too enamoured of what the family did. “I wanted to work,” he says. That meant studying in the UK in an attempt to “run away”. But as destiny would have it, Arvind came back in 2001, and plunged headlong into rebranding, marketing and selling Anand Sweets in 2002.
Today, the duo takes great pride in the fact that the endeavour caters to regular customers, gifting needs, as well as corporates. The latter, they emphasise more than once during the interview, comprise nearly 50 per cent of the business today. From fancy packaging to a presence on social media and even a revamp of their seven branches (Koramangla, Kammanahalli, Jayanagar, Banashankari, Old Airport Road, Frazer town), his attempts at modernising the brand, they believe, have taken them places.
It wasn’t always like this. As a 22-year-old, Dadu came to the city from Hyderabad and started out as a salesman. Interest in the production line led him to harbour dreams of starting his own venture, but the first few years at Anand Sweets, which he launched with ten staff members from Arya Bhavan, were anything but smooth. “I struggled to make sales. I wouldn’t get raw materials because I hadn’t paid old bills.” It took perseverance, and support from his wife, to make it to 1991, after which matters stablised.
From 60-70 items, the menu has grown to include over 200 items. Dadu handles the production and quality, while his son manages the marketing. It’s clear Dadu knows his stuff, and controls with an iron hand. “There are five basic sweet varieties — ghee, khova, milk, badam, and cashew sweets. Of the 400 staff members, there are head cooks for each variety, as there are for the namkeen and chaat items, which were added in 2002. A cricket fan who even played at the league level, Dadu’s customers naturally include cricketers or those associated with it. Unmukt Chand, Vinay Kumar, Anil Kumble’s wife (“she’s a regular at our Banashankari store”) MS Dhoni and Sachin Tendulkar (“they like the badamika”), Charu Sharma and Prakash Padukone are visitors.
For Arvind, it has been a long, but fruitful journey from looking down upon his family legacy to taking pride in it, especially after he almost quit when the Koramangala outlet didn’t do well. “For almost a year, we struggled. Even if one customer entered, we would go all out to serve them, offering extras, because we were so happy that someone came. In retrospect, that’s what built the brand. Today, that is our number one store in terms of sales,” he shares. It’s a business alright. “When I started out, people would buy sweets for home consumption. Today, there’s a lot of gifting. And gifts have to look beautiful.” Hence the emphasis on presentation and innovation— baklava, meetaaz (cashew based sweet in six flavours), badam pizza to name a few. The creative mithais, especially the badam varieties, have been so popular, says Dadu, that “all stores have now copied us.”
All the talk of sugar begs the question — does the family have a sweet tooth? Arvind laughs. “We see so much of it around that when we go out, we don’t eat dessert,” he says, as his father nods. A pity, we think. Still, that hasn’t dulled Arvind’s enthusiasm to expand the business. “We have introduced Arabian sweets such as Khaleeji. We’ve made assortments, introduced chocolate too. In a month or two, we’re going to bring in Turkish Delight, another first,” he says. After all, they do try to stay ahead of the times.

Badam milk (serves 28 glasses)

Ingredients: 10 litres milk, 60 grams cardamom powder, 30 grams jaiphal & javitri, 200 grams almonds, 0.5 gram Kesar, 5 kg ice cubes

Method: Boil the milk. Get it off the burner. Let it cool a bit. Mix all other ingredients in it. Add ice cubes into that and let it rest for two hours, and serve it once frozen.

Anand Sweets

» Five varieties of diet and sugar free sweets were introduced two years ago; online ordering was enabled seven years ago. » The most popular item is badam milk. They sell around 1,000 glasses of it. » They use 450 litres of milk, and 100-150 of badam in a day.