Yoga Bar Success Story: How 2 Sisters Built India’s Most Loved Nutrition Bar Brand

In 2015, when Suhasini and Anindita Sampath Kumar walked into retail stores across India to pitch their energy bars, the response they heard repeatedly was some variation of the same sentence. “Health nahi bikta India mein,” one retailer after another told them. Health does not sell in India. Only taste does.

The sisters had heard this before they even launched. They heard it while they were still in the product development phase, still working through the hundreds of recipe trials that would eventually produce their first multigrain energy bar. They heard it as they set up stalls at local markets and exhibitions to gather early feedback. They heard it so often that it almost became background noise.

They did not believe it. And a decade later, the numbers have settled the argument: Yoga Bar, operated by Sproutlife Foods Private Limited, reported audited turnover of ₹200 crore in FY25, more than doubling from ₹88 crore in FY23. In April 2026, Sproutlife Foods became a subsidiary of ITC Limited, one of India’s largest consumer goods companies.

A Name Born In A New York Yoga Class

The story of Yoga Bar begins not in Bengaluru, where the sisters grew up, but in New York in 2012, where both of them happened to be living at the same time for very different reasons.

Suhasini was doing an exchange programme at Wharton Business School in Philadelphia, regularly commuting to New York. Anindita was working as a manager at Ernst and Young in the city. Both were attending yoga classes at the Flatiron Building, a part of their New York routine that brought them together regularly. After one such class, the two sisters walked into a Trader Joe’s and started browsing the protein and energy bar aisle. It was a category that barely existed in India at the time in any organised or branded form.

Picking up a bar, Anindita turned to her sister and said something that would end up defining the next decade of both their lives: “If we made a healthy energy bar like this, I would call it Yoga Bar.”

Suhasini loved the name immediately. She trademarked it that same year, 2012, three years before they would sell a single product. “But we incorporated the company only in 2015,” Suhasini has said of the gap between the idea and the launch, a gap that was filled not with waiting but with one of the most thorough product development processes in the history of India’s packaged nutrition category.

Two Builders Before They Were Food Entrepreneurs

Understanding what Yoga Bar became requires understanding who built it. Neither sister came from a food manufacturing background. What they brought instead was a particular combination of financial discipline, brand instinct, and the kind of work ethic shaped by growing up in a household where, as they have described it, academics and achievement were both expected and celebrated.

Suhasini’s career before Yoga Bar had run through KPMG, where she worked as a manager for seven years, followed by an investment associate role at Multiples Alternate Asset Management, one of India’s well-regarded private equity firms. She completed an MBA in Business and Economics from the London Business School. The financial rigour and investment lens she developed across those roles shaped how Yoga Bar was built: carefully, with clear unit economics, and with a discipline about when to spend and when to hold back that is unusual in a category that typically burns through capital aggressively.

Anindita’s Ernst and Young background, working in a managerial capacity in New York, gave her a different but equally relevant set of skills: the operational discipline, process orientation, and client-facing communication experience that running a manufacturing and distribution business demands.

Together, their skill sets mapped almost perfectly onto what a founder pairing for a packaged food company needs: one with the financial and investment instincts to manage capital carefully and think about the business structurally, and one with the operational capability to manage vendors, quality, and the complexity of physical production. They did not need to hire those capabilities in. They had them between them from the start.

Three Years Of Trials Before A Single Product Shipped

The gap between the Trader Joe’s moment in 2012 and the company’s formal incorporation in February 2015 was not idle time. It was one of the most sustained and painstaking product development exercises in India’s D2C food history.

The sisters returned to India in stages, Suhasini in 2012 and Anindita in 2014, and used that period to do something most packaged food startups skip in their rush to get to market: they actually figured out the product. They went through hundreds of recipe trials. They worked with approximately 200 bakers. They tested formulations against a brief that was, by the standards of 2014 and 2015, genuinely ambitious: 100 percent clean ingredients, sourced from India, made without the additives and preservatives that were standard across the packaged food industry, and tasting good enough that Indian consumers, who had been raised on very different flavours and textures, would actually want to eat it.

“We wanted to make a 100 percent clean-ingredient-based product, sourcing raw materials from India, which can be consumed by a majority of India looking for healthy food,” Suhasini has said of what they were trying to build.

The sourcing constraint was not a marketing decision. It was a values decision, made by two sisters who had grown up in a household that prioritised homemade food, where their mother would make healthier versions of oily snacks rather than simply buying the commercial alternatives.

In August 2015, the first Yoga Bar product shipped: a multigrain energy bar that was the distilled result of everything those three years of testing had produced. Protein bars followed in 2018.

What Every Retailer Said, And What Changed Their Minds

The rejection phase that followed the launch is, in retrospect, as instructive as anything else in Yoga Bar’s story. Every retailer the sisters approached in the early years delivered the same verdict. Health does not sell in India. The category did not exist at meaningful scale. The price point was too high for what people were used to paying for a snack. The product would sit on the shelf and not move.

The sisters’ response was not to reformulate for the mass market or lower the price until the economics broke. It was to find the customers who were already looking for what they were making, build trust with those customers through direct channels, and let the product demonstrate, sale by sale, that the retailers’ model of Indian consumer behaviour was outdated.

The direct-to-consumer and e-commerce strategy that Yoga Bar built was not a choice made because offline retail was the obvious channel. It was a strategic necessity: the offline channel was largely closed to them in the early years because retailers were not willing to give shelf space to a category they did not believe in. So the sisters built the brand online, through Amazon and their own D2C platform, and let the customer data and sales velocity eventually speak a language that retailers understood.

By 2019, Yoga Bar’s revenue was ₹12 crore. By FY21 it was ₹45 crore. The brand was growing at a pace that made it impossible to ignore, and the same retail channel that had closed its doors in 2015 was opening them. By the time the ITC transaction was announced in January 2023, the brand was present across 5,000 to 6,000 retail outlets, and it had done most of that without the distribution muscle of a large FMCG company behind it.

The ITC Deal That Nestlé Almost Won

The acquisition conversation that eventually brought ITC to the Yoga Bar cap table was not exclusive. Nestlé had been circling the brand for some time and had approached the sisters on multiple occasions. ITC joined the process later. What ultimately swung the decision toward ITC, by Suhasini’s own account, was the structure of the deal rather than the price.

“We get to see how we can build an independent company and then complete the acquisition in three years’ time. That construct was probably most attractive,” Suhasini has said of why they chose ITC over Nestlé.

The Nestlé offer, presumably, would have required a faster and more complete handover of control. ITC’s willingness to structure a multi-year, staged acquisition gave the founders time to continue building before stepping back.

“ITC has grown the FMCG business in the last 20 years and they do it with a certain aggression,” Suhasini added.

The transaction structure that was announced in January 2023 reflected those priorities: an initial investment of ₹175 crore for a 39.4% stake, with further investment and acquisition of the remaining equity planned in tranches over approximately three years, based on agreed valuation criteria.

Where The Ownership Stands Today

The ownership position changed materially in April 2026. On April 1, 2026, ITC acquired the right to nominate a majority of directors to the board of Sproutlife Foods, making Sproutlife a subsidiary of ITC under the Companies Act.

It is important to be precise about what this means. ITC does not currently hold 100% of Sproutlife’s equity. Its shareholding stood at approximately 47.5% on a fully diluted basis as of March 31, 2026. The April 2026 change was about board control and governance rights, not the completion of a full equity acquisition. ITC has stated that the consideration for the remaining 52.5% is subject to pre-agreed valuation criteria and applicable terms and conditions that continue to be worked through.

For Yoga Bar’s operations, the practical implication is access to ITC’s distribution network, sourcing relationships, and organisational infrastructure at a scale that the brand could not have built independently in the same timeframe.

From Energy Bars To A Broader Nutrition Platform

The Yoga Bar that exists inside the ITC ecosystem today is considerably broader than the energy bar brand that launched in 2015. The product range now covers whey and plant-based protein products, protein and energy bars in multiple formats including wafer varieties, high-protein oats and quinoa, protein muesli and breakfast products, dry fruits and seeds, protein drinks, and ready-to-drink products.

The expansion reflects a deliberate strategy of following the customer’s nutrition needs across occasions and meal times rather than remaining confined to the between-meal bar format that built the brand’s initial identity. A consumer who bought Yoga Bar energy bars in 2015 can now buy Yoga Bar protein for their morning shake, Yoga Bar oats for breakfast, Yoga Bar muesli for a mid-morning snack, and Yoga Bar dry fruits throughout the day, a much larger share of their nutrition wallet than a single SKU could ever capture.

ITC has described Yoga Bar as a digital-first brand within its portfolio, with strong online sales through D2C and e-commerce platforms sitting alongside a growing offline presence supported by ITC’s distribution infrastructure.

The Revenue Story: ₹88 Crore To ₹200 Crore In Two Years

Sproutlife Foods’ audited turnover figures, disclosed through ITC’s regulatory filings, show the pace at which the business has been growing under the ITC partnership.

Revenue was ₹88 crore in FY23, growing to ₹108 crore in FY24, a 22.7% increase, and then accelerating sharply to ₹200 crore in FY25, an 85.2% year-on-year jump. Across the two-year period, turnover has grown approximately 127% from its FY23 base, more than doubling in size. The acceleration in FY25 reflects both the natural maturation of the brand and the beginning of the distribution benefits that the ITC relationship makes possible.

For context, the broader group of ITC’s digital-first and organic acquisitions, including Sresta Natural Bioproducts, Sproutlife Foods, Mother Sparsh Baby Care, and Ample Foods, were collectively clocking an annualised revenue run rate of more than ₹1,350 crore as of ITC’s most recent reporting. That figure represents the combined performance of all four companies, not Yoga Bar’s standalone contribution.