Diwali sweets: luxury mithai brands make a beeline for premium gifting market

A box of 30 pista katlis finished with a 24-karat gold foil priced at ₹21,000 from Khoya Mithai.

A festive pack of 36 assorted sinful sweets at Meetha by Radisson for ₹3,999, with no added preservatives.

Melt-in-the-mouth ingredients bringing Biscoff barfis and mango thandai pedas by Mithai by Roseate, priced at ₹2,000 each for 16 pieces.

Familiar Diwali sweet boxes are getting a mega-luxury makeover.

A small corner—maybe as little as 0.5% of the ₹84,310 crore Indian sweets market—is occupied by luxury sweets. Premium sweetmakers are using unusual flavours, expensive ingredients and elaborate packaging to turn traditional sweets into gifts that can cost several thousand rupees and are upwards of a few hundred rupees a piece.

In the run-up to Diwali, brands such as Khoya, Hyderabad’s Almond House, Delhi’s Arq Mithai, Ikai in Mumbai as well as Bombay Sweet House are stepping up their festive offerings, while hotel groups are trying to turn their mithai into consumer brands beyond their properties.

The commercial opportunity is not just in selling bigger corporate hampers. Individual customers are becoming an important source of demand, too, companies said, as they buy premium boxes for family, friends and business associates, often taking up to 100 boxes.

Corporate orders are up 10-15% from last year, but individual buyers remain the strongest segment, said Sid Mathur, founder and director of Delhi-based Khoya Mithai. The company expects the coming days to be particularly busy as the festival approaches. The stakes are high.

“The two-month period around Diwali, including the 15 days before and after the festival, accounts for 35-40% of Khoya’s annual revenue,” he said.

The company is betting that more consumers will trade up from conventional mithai to branded sweets and curated hampers. While there are no official figures, he estimates that premium sweets still account for less than 1% of the overall sweets market.

Expanding business

That gap between the small premium segment and the vast market for Indian sweets has attracted more and newer businesses as well over the years, but Mathur said that generally this is only expanding the luxury mithai business pie overall.

“We were the pioneers, but we don’t really see it as a threat, it’s more like a widening of the base,” he said.
The company’s festive range includes gold-leaf pista katli, jaggery-sweetened kaju katli and dry-fruit laddoos, alongside products such as nut butters and masala aam papad. Its 16-piece mithai box, weighing about half a kg, costs ₹1,800; a 36-piece box weighing more than 1 kg is priced at ₹3,600.
Manam Chocolate, which sells chocolate gifting boxes priced from ₹1,600 to ₹10,000, has seen healthy online sales and pre-bookings, said Chaitanya Muppala, founder of Manam Chocolate + Distinct Origins and CEO of Almond House. Its sweet spot is about ₹3,000.

Manam’s individual orders are a larger pie than corporate employee-gifting. The planning window for orders of thousands of boxes has largely passed, he said, while smaller business orders, typically for 10 to 30 boxes, are still coming in. And since the company caters to a luxury audience, it expects individual gifting and retail purchases to pick up closer to Diwali, which is on 8 November this year, as customers increasingly leave decisions until the last few days.

The growth expectations are not uniform across the market. Bombay Sweet Shop expects its Diwali business to grow 80% year-on-year, driven by gifting and its Indian sweets range but the company did not specify what the base was.

Hotels too

Hotel groups are pursuing a similar strategy, using sweets to reach consumers who may never book a room or dine at their restaurants.

Meetha by Radisson, the sweets brand of the Radisson Hotel Group, which started in 2020 as a response to the pandemic, has almost doubled its business year-on-year this year. Nikhil Sharma, managing director and COO, South Asia, Radisson Hotel Group, told Mint that corporate gifting is among its biggest growth drivers, along with individual gifting, weddings and celebrations.
The brand has expanded beyond traditional mithai into contemporary sweets, premium hampers, dry fruits and savouries. Mumbai and the National Capital Region are arguably the most important markets. The company is now stepping up brand-building, including a campaign featuring actor Yami Gautam, as the group seeks to establish it as an independent consumer-facing brand in its own right.

Roseate Hotels & Resorts is seeing a sharp rise in demand, too. Orders for Mithai by Roseate, which also opened an independent outlet in Aerocity Delhi in early October, have risen threefold, said Rohan Arora, director of sales and marketing. The range uses jaggery and other natural sources of sugar instead of refined sugar, while combining traditional sweets with newer flavours involving berries, nuts and Belgian chocolate.

Priced from ₹1,000 to ₹2,500, before taxes, the range is sold through a standalone Mithai by Roseate store in Delhi, opened ahead of the festive season, and at its hotels. Arora said repeat customers, including regular hotel guests, are placing advance orders rather than buying from their usual mithai shops this year.

ITC Hotels’ Ritvah is also doing signature mithai and its Fabelle range of chocolates.