Adventurous strategies, leaps of faith, failed businesses and moves and then a company which disrupted the market and clocked more than Rs 1,000 crore turnover. Indore-based businessman Amit Kumat built one of the country’s most popular homegrown chips and snack brands. He began with an investment of just a few lakh rupees and three people in a 100-square-feet room and built the Rs 2,000 crore market cap company which today competes with the likes of Nestle India, Tata Consumer Products, Adani Wilmar, Britannia, Bikaji and Patanjali Foods.
Kumat heads the Indore, MP headquartered Prataap Snacks Ltd. is the maker of one owns Yellow Diamond brand. It started selling cheese balls in 2004. In 2021, it closed the year with a net sales turnover of over Rs 1,000 crore. Kumar, who is the managing director, has a history of taking risks. In one of those moves, a bid to take on a popular rings brand in national capital Delhi did not work out leaving him with a big lot of the supposedly failed product. He took a chance and sent all of it without much hope to Assam. The product became such a massive success that Kumat’s company had to come up with two new factories making the product successive years.
Kumat comes from a cloth trading family. He did an MBA from the US but came back to set up his own business in India. He saw three failed businesses before success as a major FMCG player. He founded Prataap Snacks with brother Apoorva Kamat and one of his friends Arvind Mehta, who backed the company with initial funds. In 2012, Kumat’s firm raised Rs 62 crore from Sequoia Capital.
He roped in Bollywood superstar Salman Khan as the brand ambassador in 2016, which followed massive IPO success. Kumat is now aiming to expand his firm’s market share to 10 percent from 4-5 percent in the coming five years. The firm targets 15-20 percent growth and hopes it is driven by its namkeen vertical. The company is looking to expand its capacity by Rs 350 crore per year with a new plant in Jammu at an investment of over according to a CNBC TV18 report.
