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Rishabh Jain
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NIC | Confetti's Verdict ⭐⭐⭐
Confetti Design Studio has analysed NIC to understand how a well-run operator built a portfolio of five ice cream brands and grew Walko Food Company to Rs 289 crore in FY25, while carrying a naming problem at the centre of its flagship label.
Jeetendra Bhandari, Sanjiv Shah and Raj Bhandari built NIC around a simple promise, that if you cut the ice cream in half, all you would find is the ingredient, and design studio Firebrand turned that idea into a half and half packaging system in 2020.
But there's a problem in that promise, it uses the word "natural", and in this market, "natural" has belonged to the ice cream brand Naturals since 1984, built by Raghunandan Kamath. This audit explores whether NIC can keep building on borrowed credibility or has to spend to build its own. This audit is as per September 2026.
Walko Food Company did not stretch one ice cream label across every price point.
NIC covers premium, Grameen Kulfi covers traditional Indian kulfi, Yummo covers the mass market, Cream Pot serves hospitality and catering, and the newly acquired Meemee's covers artisanal, youth facing formats.
Almost no Indian D2C food company attempts real portfolio segmentation by price tier and occasion, and Walko has built five distinct brands.
Ice cream is arguably the best category in India for quick commerce, and NIC moved early.
It is impulse led, immediate, and impossible to stockpile the way a shampoo or snack can be, which suits ten minute delivery better than other grocery categories.
NIC ran a 250,000-cup activation with Zepto and sits across Swiggy Instamart, Blinkit, Zomato and Amazon Fresh.
This early is a real commercial advantage, not just a distribution checkbox.
NIC offers more than fifty flavours, organised into named categories rather than dumped onto one long menu.
Fruit N Nut, International Inspiration and Indian Inspirations sit alongside speciality and no added sugar lines, which is a merchandising structure a customer can actually navigate.
The July 2025 collaboration with Britannia Bourbon, done with creative agency The Womb, proved something important, the system could take on a real partnership without losing its essence in the process.
A brand this size, that can still launch a limited edition while keeping its core range intact means the flavour system is built to function.
NIC's 2020 packaging redesign with Firebrand turned an abstract ingredient claim into something you can see.
The tub splits into two clear halves, one showing the finished scoop and the other showing the raw ingredients that made it, built around a scoop motif that repeats across every flavour.
The brand's central claim is that the ingredient is the whole story and then it's built right into the pack itself.
NIC stands for an idea built on the word natural, and natural already belongs to somebody else.
Naturals, founded by Raghunandan Kamath in 1984, has decades of recall built specifically around that word.
Tracxn's own database, the same profile that tracks Jungle Ventures' investment in NIC, lists Kamath as a former co-founder of NIC Ice Creams.
When a data platform whose entire job is telling companies apart cannot separate NIC from Naturals, a customer scrolling a delivery app has no chance, and every rupee NIC spends on its name does some work for a brand it does not own.
The confusion is not only a data problem.
In 2022, Naturals' owner Siddhant Icecreams LLP took an ice cream business trading as NIC Natural Ice Creams to the Delhi High Court over the Natural and Naturals marks.
The court gave an injunction, stopping the use of those marks. Later, both sides settled, agreeing to limit how "Natural" could be used alongside the NIC name.
NIC's bio states what it offers, and the feed below it does not build on that promise.
The page relies on UGC highlights, but it's missing the storytelling aspect. Like their competitor, Naturals ties its ice cream to real Indian moments, Teachers' Day, Janmashtami, World Coconut Day, and flavours like Sitaphal that come from real fruit people grew up with.
On Independence Day, they shared a map showing which fruit is famous in which state, turning a simple post into a small tribute to the country. It makes the brand feel local and familiar.
A brand with a good half and half packaging story and a real flavour system is leaving that story on the shelf instead of carrying it into the one channel built for daily attention.
At Rs 289 crore and growing, changing how the flagship brand reads is expensive and frightening, and the alternative is accepting a permanent tax on every marketing rupee spent under a name a rival already owns in court and in customers' heads.
Confetti's view is that the cost of changing now is smaller than the cost of changing after two more funding rounds and a much larger media budget built on the same borrowed word.
The packaging philosophy already says the ingredient is the whole story.
That idea is strong enough to carry the brand's tone everywhere, not just on the tub.
Extending that same transparency into Instagram storytelling, campaign work and the parlour experience would give NIC something to be known for that has nothing to do with the word natural.
Madagascar cocoa and Mahabaleshwar strawberries are a genuine story.
That story has about two seconds to land on a phone screen at ten at night.
The flavour names and photography need to carry the same origin story that NIC already brings to its half and half packaging.
Otherwise, the ingredient story stays true on the tub but not so visible where a customer actually decides to buy.
NIC is a properly well-run operator, with real portfolio segmentation, a smart read on quick commerce, an organised flavour system and a packaging idea that makes an abstract claim visible. Growing Walko Food Company to Rs 289 crore in FY25 while integrating an acquisition is not a small achievement.
What holds it back from a stronger score is a naming problem sitting at the very centre of the flagship brand, one that shows up in investor databases, in a Delhi High Court order, and in every rupee spent building recall for a word it does not own. The business decisions are sound; the identity decision below them is not.
If you are building a food or beverage brand that needs its name and its system pulling in the same direction, this is exactly the work we do. Get in touch with our team at Confetti.
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