How Sweet Karam Coffee Turned A Grandmother’s Recipes Into A South Indian Food Brand Reaching 32 Countries

On a rainy Diwali evening in Chennai in 2015, a group of cousins went looking for murukku that tasted the way their grandmother used to make it. They checked the local shops. What they found instead were packets full of palm oil and preservatives, snacks that looked the part but tasted like none of it. The murukku their grandmother, Janaki Paati, made during festival season had a particular crunch and a particular flavour, built from a particular way of doing things that the shelves simply did not carry anymore.

That disappointment did not go away once the evening ended. It turned into a question. If a recipe this good was missing from every shop they tried, how many other people were having the same experience and just living with it?

Nalini Parthiban and her husband Anand Bharadwaj, along with their cousins Srivatsan Sundararaman and Veera Raghavan, decided to find out. With ₹2,000 and a corner of their home kitchen, they started making the snacks themselves. That was the beginning of Sweet Karam Coffee.

A decade later, the brand delivers to 32 countries, sits in more than 2,500 quick commerce dark stores across India, and has raised institutional funding totalling roughly $15 million from investors including Peak XV Partners and Fireside Ventures.

Built Around A Grandmother, Not A Business Plan

Janaki Paati did not set out to become the face of a company. She was the grandmother whose kitchen smelled like Diwali every year, who narrated stories while she fried jaangris and rolled out murukku dough, who handed her grandchildren small jobs to do while she cooked so they would stay close and stay listening.

“Every Diwali, our grandmother used to meticulously make the jaangris, murukku and Mysore pak,” Nalini Parthiban has said, describing the memories that eventually became the company’s reason for existing. “As she was cooking, she used to narrate tales to her grandchildren.”

When the founders decided to build a business around those recipes, they brought Janaki Paati onto the team itself, asking her to help give a modern twist to the traditional snacks she had spent decades perfecting. She remains the heart of the brand’s identity today, both as the source of its original recipes and as the company’s enduring mascot.

For years, the business ran on the margins of the founders’ other lives. “Our mornings were for work and our nights were for Sweet Karam Coffee,” Anand Bharadwaj has said of that early period, when the small team handled everything themselves, including, in the very beginning, distributing pamphlets by hand to get the word out locally. Nalini moved into the business full-time only in 2021, six years after it started. Anand followed in 2023.

A Strict Line On What Goes Into The Product

What differentiated Sweet Karam Coffee’s products from what was already on supermarket shelves was never novelty. It was a refusal to compromise on ingredients. The company has held to a consistent position since its earliest days: no palm oil, no preservatives, and no maida in anything it sells.

“We’re particularly proud to have led the charge against palm oil from Day 1,” Nalini has said.

That commitment, harder to manufacture at scale and more expensive to maintain than the industry norm, has remained constant even as the product range has expanded well beyond the original ten items. The catalogue today spans traditional sweets like Mysore Pak and Athirasam, a wide range of murukku and savoury snacks, Madras Mixture, peanut chikki, and banana chips, alongside South Indian filter coffee blended from Arabica beans and roasted chicory, Maavadu and other traditional pickles, ghee, and a growing line of ready-to-mix products designed to bring a two-minute version of South Indian breakfast staples into kitchens that do not have the time for the traditional process. The expansion reflects a deliberate move from being a snacks company into something closer to a complete South Indian pantry brand, built one familiar category at a time.

The category Sweet Karam Coffee operates in has only grown more relevant with time. India’s ethnic snacks market was valued at approximately $5.9 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $18.9 billion by 2034, growing at a compound annual rate of over 13%, according to IMARC Group. Peak XV Partners, one of the brand’s investors, has pointed to a similar shift within the specific South Indian segment: a market worth over ₹25,000 crore, large and fast-growing, currently moving from unorganised, hyperlocal production toward organised, branded players.

What Quick Commerce Changed

The growth that followed the founders’ early years was not immediate, but it became sharp once the brand found its primary distribution channel. What started as four people managing orders and delivery largely within their own city has grown into a team running operations across the country.

Quick commerce turned out to be the inflection point. Sweet Karam Coffee’s revenue grew 4X over a single year, a jump the company has attributed largely to its presence across thousands of quick commerce dark stores, the model that lets a craving for a specific regional snack be satisfied in minutes rather than requiring a trip to a specialty store.

“Quick commerce is bridging distribution like never before, and we’re seeing a beautiful cross-pollination of cultures,” Nalini said following the company’s Series A round. “Our products are now loved not just in the South, but across the country.”

That round, an $8 million Series A led by Peak XV Partners with participation from Fireside Ventures, arrived in 2025, nearly two years after an earlier $1.5 million round from Fireside. It brought the company’s total funding to roughly $15 million and came with the appointment of Nandhitha Indermohan, a former Unilever executive, as Chief Operating Officer.

The company has projected a further 2.5X revenue increase in the year following the round, alongside continued investment in distribution, new product development, and supply chain infrastructure.

A Brand Built On Memory, Not Marketing

What distinguishes Sweet Karam Coffee from much of the packaged snacks industry it now competes in is the consistency of its founding story across every part of the business, from product development to brand voice to community engagement. The company runs Dakshin Tales, an ongoing storytelling initiative centred on South Indian culture, heritage, and cuisine, built around the same instinct that started the company: that food carries memory, and memory is worth preserving rather than simply packaging and selling.

“We believe that stories have the power to connect, inspire, and educate,” the company has said of that initiative. “The stories of food and culture we heard from our grandmother Janaki truly inspired us, and hence she became our mascot.”

It is an unusual anchor for a company now backed by two institutional investors and delivering products to 32 countries, to still describe itself, without irony, as something built around a grandmother’s kitchen. But it is also, by most available evidence, the throughline the company has not let go of as it scaled. The recipes are still hers. The reason customers keep coming back, according to the company’s own framing, is still the same one that sent four cousins out looking for proper murukku on a rainy evening in Chennai: food that tastes like it was made by someone who actually cared whether it tasted right.