How Sauce partnered with a seasoned founder and team to build India’s fastest growing ice-cream brand
Quickshots
Founder and team pedigree
Ankit Chona is a third-generation ice-cream entrepreneur whose family sold a legacy brand to Lotte for ₹1,020 Cr in 2017. His team mixes youth and experience, built to run a ₹1,000 Cr business from day 0.
Category whitespace
India’s organised ice-cream market was worth about ₹22,860 Cr in 2023, growing at 17% CAGR through 2032. Legacy players stuck to cups and tubs with little innovation in format or flavour, leaving room to win on product and digital.
Quick commerce timing
Ice cream needs cold-chain and freezer space most Indian households lack. Blinkit, Zepto and Instamart made impulse, single-serve, in-home ordering possible without planning ahead or owning a chest freezer.
Manufacturing moat
Unlike most D2C food brands that start on contract manufacturing, Hocco built its own plants from day one, drawing on the family’s decades at Havmor. That powered innovations like fruit-shaped ice creams and faster scale-up.
Premiumisation thesis
Indian consumers were trading up on flavour and format, from biscotti to charcoal lychee to tiramisu, as they had in coffee, chocolate and personal care. Hocco launched premium sub-brand Huber & Holly while keeping mass distribution as its base.
Part I : Entry Stage & Investment Thesis
Partnering with a repeat entrepreneur who doesn’t need venture capital
Sauce made its first cheque into Hocco of ₹7.5 Cr in June 2023, as the brand’s seed round.
The Chona family sold their legacy ice cream business, built over 70 years and 3 generations, for over ₹1,000 Cr in 2017, and by the time they decided to re-enter the ice-cream business, they had grown this corpus significantly. This was among the most experienced operator teams in the country at building the full stack of the ice cream business: product development, manufacturing and distribution. And the timing was perfect. Ice creams in India had a massive tailwind, the business they had sold 6 years ago was already at 3x the scale from where they exited, and India couldn’t make enough ice creams to sustain the demand. Also, no new mass ice cream brand had been built in India over the last multiple decades and there had barely been any product innovation, leaving a gap for the young consumers who couldn’t really relate to any single brand as their own.
They did not need capital or know-how to build an ice-cream business; every private equity fund or investor was pleading with them to take their money. They did however need a partner who understood building new disruptive age brands ground up, who could unlock digital distribution (quick commerce) and keep them fiscally prudent, without stepping on their toes in execution. Having been an investor in Sauce and a co-investor alongside Sauce in some brands, the Chona family had seen first-hand the value Sauce brought to a consumer brand, and hence decided to partner with Sauce to build Hocco Ice Creams.
Sauce has been a long-time believer in our journey, backing us from the very start, and their continued support is a huge validation of what we’re building.
For Sauce, this was a validation of the Sauce thesis: invest early, partner deeply, and go all-in, which Sauce did. Three consecutive funds maxed out on Hocco Ice Creams, a level of conviction rarely seen in private investing in India. Sauce invested in the pre-seed round led by the Chonas, and continued to invest as the business scaled, scaling its funds to be able to provide the capital required to maintain the pace of growth, and most recently led the 200 Cr Series C round.
Hocco’s unparalleled scale-up journey reflects the deep expertise and goodwill the Chona family enjoys in the ice cream space. As India sees rising disposable incomes and access through quick commerce, we’re privileged to partner with this world-class team.
What Sauce brought to the table
- Introduced and worked closely with Thought Over Design to build a very differentiated, innovation-led brand
- Actively supported the build-out of team and channel partnerships for Hocco’s quick commerce entry
- Trusted board partner on all important strategic decisions, moving quickly to support the company’s blitzkrieg growth, from capital allocation to organisation building and the push towards profitability
The Spotlight : Manu Chandra & Ankit Chona on The BarberShop with Shantanu
“A lot of ice cream was harmed in the making of this episode.”
Part II : The Fundraising Journey
Reverse pitch and co-investor
Ankit was one of the first significant backers for Sauce Fund I, and then invested alongside Sauce in brands like XYXX and Mokobara from the family office, getting a flavour of how Sauce works with founders on building brands at early stage. This relationship grew into a conversation around partnering for their second foray into ice creams. Once the non-compete period got over it was a natural partnership that followed and has continued to this day.
Four rounds, one first believer
Sauce was Hocco’s first institutional investor and has stayed in every round since, alongside the Chona family.
Seed
Series A
Series B
Series C
The Impact
Largest institutional shareholder in India’s fastest growing consumer brand, demonstrating conviction-led investing with max allocation from 3 different funds
India’s largest and fastest growing ice cream brand, on path to cross ₹1,000 Cr revenue in just its third full year, and achieving breakeven with exponential growth
In less than 4 years, built a business 3x larger than the one they sold after 70 years of building, and could focus on execution without worrying about capital or investor buy-in