How Paper Boat made a shelf for India's home drinks

Hector Beverages did not begin with Paper Boat.² Its first drink was a protein water called Frissia, which “didn't do well and was phased out in a few months.”² In March 2011 it launched an energy drink, Tzinga, into a category Forbes India describes as “already dominated by existing players like Cloud 9 and Red Bull.”²

Neeraj Kakkar and Neeraj Biyani founded the company with Suhas Misra and James Nuttall, and three of the four had worked together at Coca-Cola in India.¹ Forbes India dates the founding to 2010, while afaqs says 2009.²⁷ The Paper Boat idea started at lunch, where the team reached for the aam panna Misra “brought in a steel flask every day.”²

When Nuttall went around the city looking for packaged aam panna to serve his American guests, he “returned disappointed.”¹ Investor Shripad Nadkarni says “the entire ethnic drinks category was just not present in India, till Paper Boat came.”³ Elephant Design, the agency behind the name and the pack, adds that these recipes took time and needed ingredients “increasingly difficult to source in urban environments.”⁴

In 2012 Hector took Elephant Design its plan to launch traditional Indian drinks in a ready-to-drink format.⁴ Kakkar says the whole brief to the agency was two words, “alive” and “authentic”.¹ The words came from Nadkarni.³ Kakkar defines them this way. “Alive for us is contemporary, young, fashionable, cool. Authentic is innocent, pure, natural.”³

The founders did no surveys first.¹ “If we did any, perhaps, people may not have said that they missed aam panna,” Kakkar told Mint.¹ Sources disagree on how central nostalgia was. Elephant says the brief centred on the “limbic imprint” of childhood flavours.⁴ In 2021 Inc42 reported Kakkar saying the idea was innocence and hope, with childhood memories as the form the marketing took, and that “It wasn't the core ideology then.”¹⁸

Elephant designed the pack and offered Paper Boat as one of three possible names.¹ Its case study traces the name to Jagjit Singh's rendition of Sudarshan Faakir's ghazal “Woh Kagaz Ki Kashti Wo Barish Ka Pani”.⁵

The tagline was “drinks and memories”, which Mint says fitted a plan to recreate drinks from old recipes.¹ In 2015 came the brand's first multi-media campaign, led by a film that the lyricist Gulzar wrote and narrated, themed around Malgudi Days.⁷

The pack is a standing pouch called a Doypack, which Mint says was first developed to carry drinks in space.¹ Elephant's own shape took longer.⁶ The first drinks went out in ordinary pouches with standard caps, and the doy pouch with its boat-inspired cap reached the market only by 2015.⁶ Kakkar says he had the cap redesigned after watching a woman on a flight struggle with a round cap and finally open it with her mouth, so the new one “can be opened with two fingers.”³ An icon on the back warns that the taste may vary between packs, since no two fruits taste exactly the same.⁶

Test marketing began in March 2013.² The first flavours were aamras and jaljeera, because the green mango season for aam panna was over, and they were tested in Bengaluru.¹ Retailers were refunded in full for returns, where most large companies refund only a percentage.⁸ Short-run festival drinks followed, such as thandai for Holi, an idea Kakkar says he took from Zara.³ By late 2016 Mint called Paper Boat the most expensive drinks brand per single serve, at about a 20% premium.¹

In 2013, the launch year, Hector closed an $8 million round led by Sequoia Capital.¹ It raised $30 million more in July 2015.² By 2016 Paper Boat made up 95 percent of Hector's revenue.² Reach was still thin.³ Kakkar said that year that Paper Boat sat in about 5% of the outlets where Coke is sold.³

Filings show revenue of Rs 15.9 crore in FY2014.¹ Hector blamed weak FY17 sales on shutting Tzinga and changing its distribution strategy.⁹ Kakkar said there were 2-3 months with no distribution and almost zero sales, which came with demonetisation.⁹ Unaudited figures put FY18 revenue at Rs 118 crore against Rs 69 crore the year before, with the net loss down to Rs 44 crore from Rs 78 crore.⁹ A report using Tofler data put FY19 revenue at Rs 189.56 crore.¹⁰ The loss was Rs 100.3 crore in FY20 and Rs 53 crore in FY22, when operating revenue reached Rs 330 crore.¹¹ Inc42's FY23 report gives FY22 revenue from operations as Rs 324 crore, lower than the Rs 329.9 crore of sales in its FY22 report.¹²¹³

Inc42 says Singapore's GIC invested $50 million in August 2022 and took a 25% stake.¹² Mint's sources put the deal at $70 million, with $20 million of it buying shares from existing investors.¹⁷ Kakkar told Mint that month, “We are profitable.”¹⁷ The filed FY23 accounts showed a net loss of Rs 90.6 crore on revenue of Rs 504 crore.¹³ Revenue then reached Rs 585 crore in FY24 and Rs 668.28 crore in FY25, though Entrackr's later report gives FY24 as Rs 574.48 crore.¹⁴¹⁵ Entrackr's two reports give different FY25 results.¹⁵¹⁶ The FY25 report gives a Rs 48.25 crore loss that leaves out a non-cash adjustment on preference shares, while the FY26 report says Hector made Rs 46 crore of profit that year.¹⁵¹⁶ In FY26 revenue was Rs 760 crore and profit after tax was Rs 2 crore, with over 75% of operating revenue coming from traded goods.¹⁶ In 2022 Mint reported that the company aimed to become a house of brands and buy smaller food and drink firms.¹⁷

The people involved credit consistency more than money. Nadkarni puts it down to one strong human emotion backed by consistent work, with no need for big spending.³ Kakkar says the brand kept “the same distinctive tone of nostalgia and innocence” on TV and social media, because “Once you speak the same language, people remember you better.”⁸

Design is the other half of the answer. An outside retail consultant told BusinessLine the flavours and packaging “give it a unique look at retail stores.”⁸ Kakkar calls design “a big catalyst in tempting trial”.⁶ When Dabur launched Hajmola Yoodley in similar-looking packs and flavours, Kakkar says Paper Boat held on “because we had the ad campaign going before they launched.”¹²

The doubts were about scale. Technopak's Arvind Singhal gave the company credit for the “consumer wow factor” and still said “Success of any company is its size and scale rather than consumer wow.”¹ In 2025 Entrackr wrote that Paper Boat “always had one thing going strongly for it, and that was PR”, while the numbers looked “more and more underwhelming.”¹⁵ Our reading is that the brand did its job and the accounts took far longer, and no source here shows the design caused the sales.