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Startup Deep Dive : Yoga Bar — ITC now controls it, bought one tranche at a time

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The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for Yoga Bar.

Yoga Bar built a Rs 201.66 crore-revenue business in FY25 (year ended 31 March 2025), up 83% over the previous year. The same year, it lost Rs 69.5 crore.

The company behind the brand, Sproutlife Foods, has not been fully independent since January 2023. ITC Limited, the cigarettes-to-hotels conglomerate, signed a binding term sheet to acquire it in stages rather than in one shot, and on 1 April 2026 it finally won the right to nominate a majority of Sproutlife’s board — control bought one tranche at a time, with a commitment to eventually own all of it.

Quick facts

Company Sproutlife Foods Private Limited, which owns the Yoga Bar brand
Founded 2014 in Bengaluru; incorporated as Sproutlife Foods Private Limited on 13 February 2015
Founders Anindita Sampath and Suhasini Sampath (sisters)
Businesses Yoga Bar (protein bars, muesli, oats, breakfast cereals, protein shakes and powders, peanut butter, children’s breakfast foods); the company also lists the Arthmate brand
Latest FY revenue Rs 201.66 crore (FY25, year ended 31 March 2025), up 83% over FY24
Latest FY profit/loss Net loss of Rs 69.5 crore (FY25), against a loss of Rs 60.5 crore in FY24
Listed Private; majority-controlled subsidiary of ITC Limited, which is listed on the BSE and NSE
Market value / last valuation Reported at about $51.18 million as of April 2022 (Tracxn); ITC’s cumulative stake purchases have totalled Rs 225 crore for 44.74% on a fully diluted basis as of March 2024
Key shareholders Anindita Sampath 36.78%, Suhasini Sampath 30.73%, ITC Limited 24.43%, Elevation Capital 8.06% (as reported for FY25)

What they do

Yoga Bar sells packaged, clean-label nutrition food: protein bars, high-protein muesli and oats, protein shakes and powders, peanut butter, breakfast cereals and, more recently, packaged breakfast food aimed at children. The pitch has stayed constant since the first product shipped in August 2015: no added sugar, no artificial preservatives or sweeteners, built around a health-conscious, largely urban Indian shopper who was until recently more likely to buy an imported energy bar than a domestic one. The buyer base has broadened from gym-goers and yoga practitioners, the brand’s namesake audience, to a wider health-and-wellness shopper who now finds Yoga Bar on quick-commerce apps as often as on a gym-counter shelf.

The origin

The idea did not start in a lab or a business-school case study. It started after a yoga class near the Flatiron Building in New York in 2012. Suhasini Sampath was studying for her MBA and Anindita Sampath was working with Ernst & Young in the United States; after their evening yoga sessions, both reached for the same thing everyone around them reached for — a quick energy bar. When they came back to India on visits, nothing like it existed on Indian shelves: the snack aisle was sugar and preservatives dressed up as health food. Anindita joked that if she ever started a business, she would make energy bars and call them Yoga Bar. The sisters registered the trademark that same year, four years before they sold a single bar.

They did not rush to launch. The sisters spent close to three years on product development, running trials with roughly 200 bakers before they were satisfied with a recipe, and incorporated Sproutlife Foods Private Limited in Bengaluru in February 2015. Rather than outsource manufacturing to an existing Indian contract manufacturer, as most food-startups of that era did, they chose to build their own line, spending weeks in a small facility near Coimbatore designing machines themselves because they judged the quality standards available to them at the time insufficient for what they wanted to sell.

The struggle years

The first setback came before the first bar even reached a shelf. Retailers who saw the product in 2014 and 2015 turned it away with a line the founders would repeat for years afterward: in India, health doesn’t sell, only taste does. It was not an unreasonable read of the market at the time — India’s packaged food aisles were built around indulgence, and a bar with no added sugar asking a premium price was a hard sell to a distributor thinking in volumes. The company pushed ahead anyway, launching multigrain energy bars in August 2015, and only added its now-larger protein bar line in 2018 once the core format had found a market.

The second test arrived with the pandemic. Yoga Bar had built a network of more than 6,000 offline retail stores by the late 2010s, and the 2020 lockdowns cut off that channel almost overnight. The company pivoted hard toward direct-to-consumer and e-commerce, becoming a bestseller across Amazon, Flipkart and other online grocery platforms even as it kept paying its full retail sales team and listing fees to supermarkets it could no longer fully service. The bet paid off in the numbers: revenue that stood at Rs 12 crore in FY19 had reached Rs 45 crore by FY21, a roughly 3.75-times increase over two years, with the brand reporting three-times revenue growth through the pandemic period as online demand outran what the offline network had ever delivered.

The turning point

The moment that reshaped the company’s ownership, not just its sales, came in January 2023. On 16 January that year, ITC signed a binding term sheet to acquire up to 100% of Sproutlife Foods’ fully diluted equity capital in tranches over three to four years — an unusual structure for an Indian FMCG acquisition, more a slow-motion buyout than a single deal. The first tranche closed on 4 May 2023: ITC paid Rs 175 crore (about $18.2 million at $1 ≈ Rs 96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) for 39.42% of the company on a fully diluted basis, through a mix of equity shares and compulsorily convertible preference shares. ITC’s food division chief executive, Hemant Malik, framed it as a fit with the company’s “Good for You” portfolio, alongside brands such as Aashirvaad Nature’s Super Foods and Sunfeast Protein Shake.

The numbers on either side of that transaction tell the story of what changed. Before the ITC term sheet, Sproutlife was a standalone, founder-run D2C brand generating roughly Rs 88 crore in revenue in FY23, funded by consumer-focused venture capital. Two years after ITC’s initial cheque, revenue had more than doubled to Rs 201.66 crore in FY25 — helped by ITC’s distribution reach and, from January 2026, the appointment of Anuj Bansal, an ITC Foods executive committee member, as Yoga Bar’s chief business officer. ITC added a further Rs 50 crore in March 2024, taking its stake to 44.74% and its cumulative outlay to Rs 225 crore, before crossing the line into outright control: from 1 April 2026, with a 47.5% fully diluted stake, ITC gained the right to nominate a majority of Sproutlife’s directors, formally making it a subsidiary. In its first quarter as parent, ITC booked an exceptional gain of Rs 405.88 crore in Q1 FY27 from remeasuring its existing stake to fair value on gaining control — an accounting entry, not a cash payment, but a marker of how much more valuable ITC now judges the stake to be than what it paid for the first slice of it.

The money behind it

How it makes money

The numbers

Three consecutive years of filed or reported financials show a business scaling fast while losses widen more slowly than revenue, then narrow on a unit basis in the most recent year (figures in Rs crore).

Fiscal year Revenue (Rs crore) Net profit/loss (Rs crore)
FY23 (ended 31 Mar 2023) 88 Not disclosed in sources reviewed
FY24 (ended 31 Mar 2024) 110 Loss of 60.5
FY25 (ended 31 Mar 2025) 201.66 Loss of 69.5

Where the money comes from

The risks

The takeaway

The lesson in Yoga Bar’s ownership structure is not about snacking at all. It is about how a loss-making but fast-growing founder brand can borrow a strategic acquirer’s balance sheet, manufacturing scale and distribution years before its own unit economics can carry it, without handing over the keys in a single signature. Staging the deal in tranches — 39.42% in 2023, 44.74% in 2024, board control at 47.5% in 2026, with 100% contracted for over three to four years — let both sides defer the hardest question, what is this business really worth, until there was more revenue to value it against. The trade-off is that control, not just capital, changes hands gradually and, once the board seats move, irreversibly.

Frequently asked questions

Who owns Yoga Bar now?

ITC Limited holds a 47.5% fully diluted stake in Sproutlife Foods, the company behind Yoga Bar, and has held the right to nominate a majority of its board since 1 April 2026, making it an ITC subsidiary. Founders Anindita Sampath and Suhasini Sampath remain significant shareholders and directors, and ITC has committed under a binding term sheet to acquiring up to 100% over three to four years from January 2023.

How much did ITC pay for Yoga Bar?

ITC paid Rs 175 crore for an initial 39.42% stake in May 2023, then a further Rs 50 crore in March 2024 to reach 44.74%, taking its cumulative investment to Rs 225 crore. The price for the remaining stake toward 100% has not been disclosed and is understood to follow a pre-agreed valuation formula in the binding term sheet.

Is Yoga Bar profitable?

No. Sproutlife Foods reported a net loss of Rs 69.5 crore in FY25 on revenue of Rs 201.66 crore, wider in rupee terms than its Rs 60.5 crore loss in FY24, though the company spent less per rupee of revenue earned in FY25 (Rs 1.35) than in FY24 (Rs 1.58).

What does Yoga Bar sell?

Protein bars, high-protein muesli and oats, protein shakes and powders, peanut butter, breakfast cereals and packaged breakfast foods for children, sold as clean-label products without added sugar or artificial preservatives.

Who founded Yoga Bar and when?

Sisters Anindita Sampath and Suhasini Sampath founded it, registering the Yoga Bar trademark in 2012 and incorporating Sproutlife Foods Private Limited in Bengaluru in February 2015, ahead of the brand’s first product launch in August 2015.

Sources

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

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