How Lahori Zeera Built A ₹525 Crore Desi Beverage Empire

“We chose to maintain a traditional moniker for our drinks because the Indian cuisine and street food of this nation serve as the inspiration for our whole product line. Rock salt, also known as Lahori namak, is another essential component in the majority of our recipes. That is how the term Lahori was coined.”

Those words belong to Saurabh Munjal, CEO and co-founder of Lahori Zeera, and they capture, in a single breath, the entire founding logic of one of India’s fastest-growing beverage companies. The name is not a brand exercise. It is a provenance statement. The drink is not a product invented in a market research survey. It is a memory, a recipe, a summer afternoon in Punjab, poured into a bottle and put on a shelf at ₹10.

That ₹10 price point is where the story actually begins.

Three Cousins, One Kitchen, A Recipe Nobody Had Bottled

In 2016, Nikhil Doda, one of 3 co-founders of what would become Lahori Zeera, was in his kitchen recreating a drink from childhood: cumin, black salt, lemon, black pepper, dry ginger. The goli soda and banta of Punjab street summers, but carbonated, bottled, consistent. He gave it to his cousins Saurabh Munjal and Saurabh Bhutna to try. They both felt, immediately, like they were eight years old again.

That sensation was the product insight. Not a focus group or a category analysis, though those would come later. A feeling, shared across three grown men who had been thinking about building something together for years. If this drink took them back, it would take others back too. And unlike nostalgia for a film or a song, nostalgia for a drink could be satisfied in a cold, fizzy, immediately purchasable way.

The trio formed Archian Foods Pvt. Ltd. in Mohali in 2017. All three brought different strengths. Munjal came from a family of entrepreneurs in Punjab, with a background in trade finance and hospitality that had sharpened his commercial instincts. Doda brought operational discipline and an instinct for process. Bhutna contributed marketing experience from running digital campaigns for local brands. It was, as co-founder Nikhil Doda has described it, a collaboration built on a bond that predated the business by decades.

“We’re first cousins, the same age, and have grown up together. This built a deep bond and an instinctive understanding between us. Doing something together was always the dream.”

Scaling What Nobody Else Had Scaled

The Indian beverages market in 2017 had room at both ends: global carbonated drink giants commanding the mainstream, and local nimbu pani sellers commanding the street. The organised, branded, affordable middle, the space for desi flavours with modern distribution and consistent quality was largely empty. Lahori Zeera identified that gap precisely and built into it without straying.

The flagship Lahori Zeera drink, a carbonated jeera beverage at ₹10 for 160 ml, became the anchor. Around it grew a range: Nimbu, Kacha Aam, Shikanji, Imli Banta, each a recognisable desi flavour translated into a bottled format that could sit in a kirana store, a railway station kiosk, or a modern trade shelf equally comfortably. The pricing was not a concession to the market; it was the founding conviction: if you price it right, you capture India, not just urban India.

Unlike many modern consumer startups that chase urban modern trade or quick-commerce platforms first, Lahori built its fortress in the General Trade (GT) ecosystem. Nearly 97% to 98% of Lahori’s volume runs through deep general trade channels across nearly a million retail touchpoints, turning local mom-and-pop stores into its strongest advocates.

The growth that followed was rapid by any measure. Revenue went from ₹80 crore in FY21 to ₹250 crore in FY22, a more than three-fold jump in a single year. By FY24, revenue had reached ₹312 crore with profits tripling to ₹22.5 crore. Audited corporate filings for FY25 saw revenue surge to ₹540 crore (up roughly 73% year-on-year), with the company commanding a dominant market share in the organised desi beverage segment.

To keep up with demand, production capacity scaled aggressively, hitting 5 million bottles daily, supported by expanded manufacturing and co-bottling setups across states like Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, and Gujarat.

Institutional investors took notice early. Belgian investment firm Verlinvest backed the company with a $15 million investment in 2022. In mid-2025, Lahori raised an additional ₹200 crore in a round led by Motilal Oswal Wealth, bringing the company’s valuation to approximately ₹2,800 crore ($330 million) and total institutional funding to roughly ₹385 crore.

A National Brand Built Without National Advertising

One of the most instructive elements of Lahori Zeera’s growth is how little of it depended on conventional brand-building. For the first several years, the company relied almost entirely on distribution depth and product quality rather than above-the-line advertising. Word of mouth in a region where the taste already felt familiar proved to be a powerful, organic force.

The first major national advertising campaign, “Har Koi Peeta, Lahori Zeera,” created by Enormous, arrived only in 2024, by which point the brand was already generating hundreds of crores in revenue and had expanded from its Punjabi roots into Maharashtra, West Bengal, and South India. The campaign pushed the brand from regional recognition into genuine national consciousness, arriving at exactly the right moment when the distribution infrastructure could fully support the surge.

By 2025, the brand’s team had grown to over 1,800 people. Its product range expanded beyond carbonated drinks into still beverages in categories including lassi, buttermilk, aam panna, and fruit-based drinks. International trials followed, including soft launches targeting the Indian diaspora in the UAE.

The target, publicly stated by the leadership team, is to scale toward a ₹1,000+ crore revenue horizon. On its current trajectory, it is a question of when rather than whether.

“We didn’t just sell a drink,” Munjal has said. “We brought back a culture.”

For a company that started with a kitchen experiment and a childhood memory, that description is less a marketing line and more an accurate account of what the product actually did.