Category: Speaking & events

In ten years of running Käse, Anuradha Krishnamoorthy has never paid for a single line of press coverage. No influencer budget, no marketing retainer, no PR agency on monthly fees. Yet the brand has been written about repeatedly, has won at the World Cheese Awards, and now ships across India from a kitchen in Chennai.

When she said this to me recently in the Founder Catalyst studio, my first instinct was to treat it as a nice story about a niche business getting lucky with the press. It is not. Sitting with the rest of the conversation, I think it is the most instructive thing about how she and her co-founder built this company, and it connects to almost everything else they did differently.

Anuradha is a friend, and this was a conversation I had wanted to record for a long time. She is the co-founder and director of Kirke Cheese Pvt Ltd, which runs the brand Käse. She and her co-founder Namrata Sundaresan received the Nari Shakti Puraskar for 2017, presented by the President of India at Rashtrapati Bhavan in March 2018, on International Women’s Day. Käse turned ten this year.

The business that started as a training programme

The origin story is not a food story. Anuradha has a masters in social work, and before cheese she was running CAN DO, a venture she developed as an ISB 10,000 Women scholar. CAN DO trained and employed people with disabilities in telecalling, data validation and research work. At one point it ran a forty seat operation employing people with hearing impairment and people with visual impairment.

Two mothers came to her about their daughters, both with hearing impairment, both unable to complete their graduation. They asked whether Anuradha could help find the girls work. She began looking at setting up a baking unit, since baking was a skill the girls could take with them and use independently later.

She approached Namrata to help set it up. Namrata had learnt cheesemaking during a farm stay in Coonoor over a break, and suggested cheese instead of bread. That conversation is the entire founding decision. Within a year, two girls with hearing impairment were part of the team at Käse.

What strikes me about this is that the business did not begin with a market opportunity. It began with a specific problem for two specific people, and the product was chosen because it happened to be a teachable skill. Most founders would consider that backwards. Ten years on, it has produced a pan India brand.

Why the phone changed her mind about hiring

The part of the conversation I keep returning to is her explanation of why employing people with disabilities worked commercially, not just morally.

Her point was simple. When someone is speaking to you on a telephone, you have no idea whether they have a visual impairment. There is no visible cue, so there is no room for the usual hesitation or discomfort. Only the work is visible. The prejudice never gets a chance to form.

She paired that with something sharper. The moment you think of employing a person with a disability as charity, she said, the work ends right there. These are individuals looking for an opportunity, and they are resources like anybody else on the payroll.

I put the founder’s objection to her directly, because I hear it often. Founders and CEOs are already under pressure. They worry about hiring someone, finding it does not work, and then being in the difficult position of having to let them go. They also worry about causing offence, because most of us were never trained as a society to work alongside people with disabilities.

Her answer was that hiring a person with a disability changes the team, not just the headcount. She described how the person with hearing impairment and the person with visual impairment worked as a genuinely effective pair. One handled data mining and database validation, the other made the calls. Screen readers and magnifiers, much of it open source, made the second half possible. That was a decade ago. The tooling is far better now.

Several people who worked at CAN DO went on to government and bank jobs, roles that are heavily sought after. They still come back and tell her that the first chance to prove themselves is what made those jobs possible.

Anyone starting this today has better technology, better software, and a larger pool of people who have already been through skills training. The founders who are getting this right are treating it as recruitment, not as a corporate social responsibility line item.

The pricing decision that most founders get wrong

Käse decided early that it would be a hundred per cent preservative free brand and that the milk would come from grass fed cows on small farms. That decision has consequences. One litre of milk yields roughly a hundred grams of milk solids, so a kilogram of cheese requires around ten litres of milk. Skimmed or toned milk will not work, because the fat content carries the quality through to the cheese.

The arithmetic makes a premium price unavoidable. What took nerve was holding that price in Chennai, a market everyone told them was difficult to crack.

Anuradha gave me a number that I think every founder in food should sit with. On a five hundred rupee pizza, the actual ingredient cost is around thirty per cent. That thirty per cent is the only lever a business has if profit is the sole objective, so the pressure is always to compress it further. Being in the food business, she said, opens your eyes to what goes into food, including in kitchens at star hotels.

Käse went the other way. They raised quality, accepted the cost, and priced accordingly.

I see the opposite mistake constantly. Only the other day I was speaking with a founder running a services company with a genuinely good offering who is struggling, purely because his price point is wrong. Raise it and he is in a different orbit entirely. We come from a conservative business culture where the instinct is to be the cheapest. Being the cheapest is a strategy, but it is Walmart’s strategy, and it requires a scale most founders will never have.

The Tata Nano Car is the example I keep coming back to. It was engineered well and marketed as the cheapest car available, and that positioning is a large part of why it failed. Today the equivalent segment sells at ten to twelve lakhs quite comfortably.

Käse spent its first year at seventeen artisan markets in a single calendar year. Unless people taste the product and find value in it, no price point survives. That is the work that earns the right to charge more.

How the press actually happened

This brings us back to where we started. The press came, and it came free, for reasons that have very little to do with press strategy.

There are only thirty to forty artisan cheese makers in a country of this size, so the category itself is unusual. Then there was the product. They made a cheddar with molagapodi, the chilli powder that ordinarily goes with idli and dosa. Cheese and Chennai do not sit naturally in the same sentence, and molagapodi and cheddar sit even less naturally together. People had something to talk about.

Alongside that was the hiring story, which visitors and journalists noticed on their own.

Neither of these was manufactured. You cannot run a brainstorming session and arrive at an authentic differentiator. They hired the girls because that was the reason the business existed. They made molagapodi cheddar because they are in Chennai. The stories fed each other.

Her view on influencer budgets follows from this. Influencers have a role to play, but at a later stage, when you can afford it and you are scaling something that already works. When you are a niche brand with no outside capital, spending there first is the wrong order of operations. Reviews can be bought. Loyalty cannot. She made the point that if she has a genuinely good evening at a restaurant with her family, she will want to write a good review without being asked, and no budget replicates that.

Most Käse customers today arrive through recommendations from other customers.

On co-founders and the honeymoon ending

I asked her about the co-founder relationship, because I see so many partnerships drift apart a few years in, often after success rather than before it. She agreed with the comparison to a marriage. The honeymoon ends, reality arrives, and expectations diverge.

What has held theirs together is a clean division of ownership. Anything product related is Namrata’s call, because she is the cheesemaker and Anuradha describes herself as her student on that front. Operations and finance sit with Anuradha. They consult each other on most decisions, but each decision has a single owner.

That last part matters more than it sounds. Splitting responsibility is easy. Someone still has to own cash flow and pricing, because salaries have to be paid on time regardless of who feels responsible.

They were acquaintances rather than close friends when they started Käse, and the friendship deepened through the business rather than being risked by it. Neither of them was a first time founder either, which I suspect explains more than they give it credit for.

The number she wants to change

The last stretch of our conversation was about women founders, which was one of the main reasons I wanted to record this episode. The numbers suggest the proportion of women entrepreneurs in India has risen substantially over the last two decades. I do not doubt the direction, but in the mentoring sessions and angel meetings I sit through, I am still not seeing it.

Anuradha was direct about why. Indian women often start out on genuinely equal footing, and the divergence appears later, when the role that a woman is expected to carry at home begins to compete with the role she is building outside it.

She has decided to change the ratio in the only place she fully controls. Käse’s expansion, which is now under way with a significant increase in production capacity, will remain a women led and women run business.

She also had a warning that applies beyond food. There is an enormous amount of information available now, and no reliable way for most people to tell information from misinformation. Do not treat everything on the internet as settled truth. Do some digging yourself before you act on it. She was pleased, though, to see younger customers reading labels closely. That awareness is itself an opening for anyone building an honest product.

What I took away

The unpaid press, the premium pricing, the hiring, and the co-founder discipline all look like separate decisions. They are not. They are the same decision made four times.

In each case Anuradha and Namrata chose the thing that was genuinely true about their business over the thing that would have been easier to execute or explain. Grass fed milk, so the price is high. A social work background, so the hiring reflects it. Chennai, so the cheddar has molagapodi in it. None of it was designed to be interesting. It became interesting because it was real, and the coverage followed on its own.

Marketing budgets are usually the price you pay for a business that has nothing worth talking about.

The full conversation is on the Founder Catalyst podcast and YouTube channel: