Startup Deep Dive : Keventers — the milkshake brand that came back from the dead

Keventers crossed roughly ₹100 crore in system sales by FY19-20, running 162 glass-bottle kiosks built almost entirely on a brand its own family had walked away from for forty years. That is the improbable number. Here is the contradiction: the very same year the brand was compounding fastest, a Delhi High Court judge looked at a Keventers shake in court and told the company’s own lawyers it was “not at all fit for consumption.”

The gap between those two facts, hyper-growth on one side, a judge questioning basic quality on the other, is the real story of Keventers: a century-old dairy name, left for dead by its own owners in the 1970s, revived by two twenty-something friends as a nostalgia project, nearly undone by the franchise sprawl that made it famous, and now being rebuilt a third time as a packaged-goods and quick-commerce brand under a professional CEO.

Quick facts

What they do

Keventers sells milkshakes, its foil-topped glass-bottle signature, alongside ice cream, waffles and a smaller food menu, mostly to young, urban Indians who grew up seeing the bottles on Instagram before they ever tasted one. The format is a small-footprint kiosk or dine-in counter, run either by the company or by a franchisee, in malls, food courts, high streets and, increasingly, on Swiggy and Zomato. Since 2026 the company has said it wants to sell the same shakes and ice cream as packaged, off-the-shelf products through quick commerce and general retail, a shift from “restaurant you visit” to “brand you find in a freezer,” as per statements from incoming CEO Shaurya Prabhat.

The origin

The name is not new. Edward Keventer, a Danish dairy technologist brought to India by the British government in 1889, built a dairy business that by 1925 had a shop in Delhi’s Chanakyapuri selling milk, milkshakes and the cassata ice cream that would become its calling card. After Keventer’s death in 1937, industrialist Ramkrishna Dalmia bought the brand in 1940 and ran it through its peak, supplying milk powder to the Indian Army by the 1960s, before the government shut the Chanakyapuri plant in the 1970s to build a diplomatic enclave on the land. The Dalmias let the brand lapse; a handful of unlicensed outlets, including one in Connaught Place, kept the Keventers name alive without any formal link to the family for close to four decades.

The revival came from inside the family, not outside it. Agastya Dalmia, Ramkrishna Dalmia’s great-grandson and a Delhi University English graduate, and his friend Aman Arora, a Delhi University economics graduate who had interned at Ogilvy & Mather, saw an asset nobody was using: a name with genuine nostalgia value and no active competitor claim on it. Neither had run a food business before. The insight was less operational than emotional, that a bottle-and-branding refresh of a name older customers already trusted, and younger customers had never known, could be sold as a lifestyle product rather than just a drink.

The struggle years

The first attempt failed fast. In 2013-14, Dalmia and Arora opened a single outlet in Pitampura, Delhi; it shut within about nine months, undone by inexperience in running a food outlet day to day. Rather than walk away, the pair brought in Sohrab Sitaram, a veteran restaurateur who had run the Chi Kitchen & Bar chain, as director and eventually chief executive, to supply the operating discipline they lacked. The second attempt, at Select Citywalk mall in 2015 with about twenty recipes and roughly ₹2 crore of initial capital, is the one that held.

It held, but not cleanly. As the franchise network raced past 200 outlets, quality control became the company’s most public weakness rather than its growth story. In June 2019, Super Milk Products was in Delhi High Court arguing that a licensee, Prime Interglobe, was selling Keventers-branded products that were a health hazard without FSSAI approval. Justice J R Midha did not take the company’s side of the story at face value: he told its lawyers “Keventers was no longer as good as it used to be,” that the products were “not at all fit for consumption,” and that he had had the same experience “at several outlets,” before directing both sides to mediate rather than litigate. Then, in the first six months of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, system sales fell by more than 40% from a base of close to ₹100 crore, a shock to a business whose franchisees carried much of the fixed-cost risk.

The turning point

The clearest before-and-after line runs through October 2022, when Jubilant Bhartia Group, the conglomerate behind Domino’s India franchisee Jubilant FoodWorks, took a minority stake in Super Milk Products Private Limited, joining existing backer 108 Capital. Before the deal, Keventers had scaled almost entirely on franchisee capital and founder money, expanding to roughly 50 cities across India, the UAE and Kenya on a growth model that had already shown, through the pandemic and the court case, how thin its safety margin was. After the deal, the company had, for the first time, a large strategic partner with restaurant-operating experience of its own, and it set a public target of opening more than 300 additional stores over the following three to four years while pushing into direct-to-consumer, FMCG and cloud-kitchen formats it had never seriously tried before. The deal size was not disclosed by either party or by their legal advisers.

The money behind it

• Founder capital, 2015: Agastya Dalmia and Aman Arora put in around ₹2 crore to relaunch at Select Citywalk, alongside Dalmia family backing (Weekend Leader).
• 108 Capital: an existing institutional investor in Super Milk Products Private Limited ahead of the 2022 round (Tracxn, CB Insights).
• Jubilant Bhartia Group, October 2022: came in as a minority partner in a “corporate minority” round; deal value undisclosed by the company, its advisers (JSA acted on the deal, KPMG as financial adviser) or Jubilant. Data aggregators peg the round near $7.9 million, but this figure is unconfirmed by the company and is cut from the money total below for that reason.
• What changed after the round: a public commitment to open 300-plus new stores in three to four years and to fund entry into D2C, FMCG and cloud kitchens (Outlook Startup, M&A Critique, October 2022).
• Total raised: one confirmed institutional round (amount undisclosed) plus founder and family capital; Keventers has not disclosed a headline valuation at any point.
• Ownership split reported in the press: Aman Arora and Sohrab Sitaram roughly 10% each, the Dalmia family holding the balance before Jubilant’s minority stake was carved out (Weekend Leader).

How it makes money

Keventers earns primarily the way any bottled-shake QSR chain does: it sells a high-margin drink (mostly milk, sugar, flavouring and ice) at a branded premium, then collects a second layer of income by franchising the format instead of funding every outlet itself.

• Company-owned stores: direct sales of milkshakes (historically priced around ₹79-270) and ice cream (around ₹150-250), per Weekend Leader and The Strategy Story.
• Franchise fees: a one-time licence fee of about ₹9 lakh per outlet, with franchisees separately investing roughly ₹25-30 lakh to fit out a store as small as 100 sq ft (Weekend Leader).
• Format mix, FY23: milkshakes contributed about 75% of sales and ice cream about 25%, a split the company said it wanted to move toward 60% milkshakes, 30% ice cream and 10% food over three to four years (Snackfax/Agro & Food Processing, April 2023).
• Delivery and aggregators: online orders through Swiggy and Zomato made up an estimated 40-45% of sales as of that same FY23 disclosure, with ice cream also listed as a standalone SKU on those platforms.
• Emerging channels, from 2026: packaged retail, quick commerce and institutional sales, a shift the incoming CEO explicitly linked to reducing dependence on new-store capex for growth.
• The part people get wrong: Keventers looks like a beverage brand living off dairy margins, but its real earnings engine has always been the franchise fee and rent-light kiosk format; same-store sales at owned outlets barely cover the cost of the quality control the brand has struggled to enforce across 200-plus franchisees.

The numbers

Super Milk Products Private Limited does not publish a full multi-year profit-and-loss account; only fragments have surfaced through management interviews and MCA filings analysed by data providers. The figures below therefore mix two different metrics, system-wide sales across all franchise outlets, and the company’s own booked revenue, and are labelled accordingly rather than forced into a false single series.

Read together, the pattern is a business that got back to roughly its pre-pandemic scale by FY25 but has not shown the step-change growth its own targets, ₹700 crore system turnover by FY26 was the figure management gave in 2021, promised. Profit/loss detail for FY19-22 was not available outside paywalled aggregator reports and has been left out rather than estimated.

Where the money comes from

• Product split, FY23: milkshakes ~75% of sales, ice cream ~25%, with a stated target of 60% milkshakes / 30% ice cream / 10% food within three to four years (Snackfax, April 2023).
• Channel split, FY23: roughly 40-45% of sales came through online/delivery aggregators, the rest through walk-in store sales (Snackfax, April 2023).
• Ownership split of outlets, 2021: about 20 company-owned-and-operated stores versus roughly 250 franchisee-owned-and-operated stores out of a reported 270-store network across 32 cities (Weekend Leader).
• Geography: the core market is urban India, with additional franchise footprint in Nepal, the UAE and Kenya (multiple sources, 2017-2021 reporting).
• The surprise: a brand people associate with its own stores makes the bulk of its unit economics off other people’s capital, franchisees fund the real estate and fit-out, while Keventers earns fees and product margin without owning most of the shopfronts that carry its name.

The risks

• Quality control across a franchise-heavy network: the 2019 Delhi High Court case, where a judge told the company’s own lawyers its products were “not at all fit for consumption,” showed how a single non-compliant licensee can damage the brand nationally; with the bulk of outlets franchisee-run, enforcement is structurally harder than for a company-owned chain (Scroll.in, Business Standard, LawStreet Journal, June 2019).
• Wafer-thin margins: a reported net margin of about 0.17% in FY25 leaves almost no cushion; a repeat of a Covid-scale demand shock, or a sustained rise in milk and dairy input costs, could tip the company from marginal profit into loss with little warning.
• Crowded, easy-to-copy category: bottled-milkshake rivals such as Frozen Bottle and Shakos, along with cloud-kitchen dessert brands, compete on the same low-capex format Keventers pioneered for the segment; Keventers’ main defence is heritage and brand recall rather than a hard-to-replicate operating advantage, which matters more as the company pushes into packaged retail and quick commerce where private labels and larger dairy players already compete on cost.

The takeaway

Keventers’ real lesson is not about milkshakes, it is about the limits of nostalgia as a moat. A dormant, trusted name got the company through its first wave of growth almost for free: customers arrived curious about a bottle their parents remembered, and Instagram did the rest. But brand equity built on memory cannot police what two hundred separate franchisees put in a blender each morning, and it took a courtroom, not a boardroom, to say so out loud. The company’s answer, professionalising under a career operator, cutting reliance on constant new-store capex, and moving toward packaged formats it can actually standardise, is really an admission that heritage got it in the door, and operating discipline is what has to keep it there.

Frequently asked questions

Who owns Keventers today?

Keventers is operated by Super Milk Products Private Limited, majority-owned by the Dalmia family alongside co-founders Aman Arora and Sohrab Sitaram, who are reported to hold about 10% each. Jubilant Bhartia Group holds a minority stake it acquired in October 2022.

Is Keventers the same company as Keventer Agro Limited?

No. Both trace their name to the same Edward Keventer dairy legacy, but they are separate businesses today: Keventer Agro Limited is an East India-focused FMCG and dairy group, while the milkshake and ice cream chain discussed here is run by Super Milk Products Private Limited under the Keventers brand.

How much has Keventers raised, and what is it worth?

The company has disclosed one institutional round, a minority investment from Jubilant Bhartia Group in October 2022 alongside existing backer 108 Capital, but neither the amount nor a valuation has been made public by the company or its advisers.

What was the 2019 court case about?

Super Milk Products went to the Delhi High Court to stop a licensee, Prime Interglobe, from selling Keventers-branded products it said were unsafe and lacked FSSAI approval. The judge hearing the case told the company’s lawyers the products on sale were “not at all fit for consumption” and directed both sides to mediate.

Is Keventers profitable?

On the most recent disclosed MCA filing, for the year ended March 2025, the company reported revenue of ₹96.54 crore with a thin net profit margin of about 0.17%, effectively break-even rather than comfortably profitable.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Scroll.in, “A legacy ice cream brand reinvented itself for millennials with milkshakes and Instagrammable bottles” and “‘Keventers is no longer as good as it used to be,’ says Delhi High Court judge,” June 2019
• Wikipedia, “Keventers Milkshake,” accessed September 2026
• The Weekend Leader, “Shaking it up,” profile of Agastya Dalmia, Aman Arora and Sohrab Sitaram
• The Hard Copy, “Keventers: A Heritage Brand For Millennials”
• The Strategy Story, “Keventers is rising again for its famous milkshakes,” September 2020
• Business Standard, “Keventers not as good as before: HC judge during hearing,” June 2019
• India TV News and LawStreet Journal, reports on the Delhi High Court hearing, June 2019
• Business Standard / Zee Business, “Keventers on expansion drive; targets system turnover of Rs 700 cr by 2025-26,” October 2021
• Snackfax / Agro & Food Processing, “Keventers to focus on non-dairy and ice cream portfolio; eyes 10% sales,” April 2023
• Outlook Startup and M&A Critique, reports on the Jubilant Bhartia Group minority investment in Super Milk Products Private Limited, October 2022
• JSA (law firm), deal note on the Jubilant Group minority investment in Keventers
• Tofler and thecompanycheck.com, financial filings of Super Milk Products Private Limited (CIN U15201DL2015PTC280996), FY24-FY25
• Tracxn and CB Insights, company and funding profiles for Keventers, accessed September 2026
• afaqs!, Medianews4u and Franchise India, reports on the appointment of Shaurya Prabhat as CEO, March 2026

Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.