The Emerging Smoothie Czar: Samrat Reddy of Drunken Monkey

FROM FOUR smoothie bars in Hyderabad to 60 outlets in 16 cities, Drunken Monkey has climbed up the ladder of exponential growth in the period of two years. Currently present in cities like Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, Pune, Vijayawada, Indore, Kolkata, Visakhapatnam, Chennai, Guntur, Jalandhar, Chandigarh, Surat, Thane, Vellore, and Kakinada, the company is aiming for 150 outlets by 2019. BW Hotelier got a chance to meet the founder of Drunken Monkey, Samrat Reddy who is young, energetic and all heads up.

While studying in UK, Reddy always felt the market gap in the beverages industry. “I always felt that beverages are very limited to tea and coffee. Having said that India has always been a place where the culture of fruits resides, I thought to fill the market need. India is the second largest producer of fruits and climate here is more suitable for having something cold like smoothies rather than Europe and USA,” he says. Keeping the tagline ‘Naturally High’, Reddy feels that Drunken Monkey is the crusader in that genre.

Currently, Reddy is focusing the South East and West India before conquering the North market. For him, Delhi is a tough market. Our company is based on how we manage our logistics because we deal with fresh fruits. In Delhi, with the amount of traffic here, logistically we have a lot of challenges. In every city we have our own warehouse and have a logistics team which takes care of all the material going to each outlet,” he adds. At present, Drunken Monkey has three outlets in Delhi and one in Chandigarh.

Founded with the investment of INR 4 Cr, the company has created 170 varieties of smoothies, made from locally-sourced, natural ingredients, without preservatives. According to Reddy, the idea is to create a new market and offer a new lifestyle option to people. The outlets are run in a franchise model with some of them being company owned. “We have a team who regularly visit the outlet and makes a report on a weekly basis. Logistics and operations are managed by us,” Reddy told us.

Dealing with fruits might be problematic, so how Drunken Monkey is coping with it? Answering to this Reddy explained, “As soon as the fruits ripe, we cut and store them in the temperature between -1 to -2 degree in an airtight container. This ensures that the freshness and the nutrition value is kept intact. We generally use it within three to four days.”

From detox to protein smoothies, the R&D team is working upon the Menu list to add on some food items which will be out by mid of August. Adding more to it, Reddy says, “We will be bringing some healthy sandwiches and protein meals. Firstly, we want to reach out to all cities and may come into the retail segment as well.”

For Reddy, business is all about taking the calculative risk. “The reason we started from Hyderabad was we didn’t want to get copied. I had options to start in Bangalore and Chennai, but we didn’t want to attract attention on the first hand,” he adds. Today, while he sits on the throne of Smoothie industry being the Czar, he is all positive to take his brand overseas. “Today while we are serving one bottle per eight seconds, maybe we can touch 50 bottles per second and more. The sky is the limit!” he smiles.