Taste of Tradition

An iconic sweet shop from Pune is defying the three-generation rule to scale up the business and take its products global

- Pushpita Dey

It is a sultry May after-noon in Pune. But at the Chitale Bandhu Mithaiwale outlet near Deccan Gymkhana, it is business as usual. A steady stream of customers keeps flowing into the sweet shop, some to make a quick purchase, others lingering to sample new offerings.

The constant hustle is familiar for Indraneel Chitale, who never envisioned a future in the family business. Instead, he studied engineering after school as “there was no pressure from the family to take over the business in future”.

“It was not about understanding the business but being employable in case something goes wrong.

That is what we were told—to be able to stand on your own no matter what the legacy,” he tells Outlook Business.

But destiny had other designs. Despite professional detours, Kedar Chitale and his cousin Indraneel found their way back to the legacy their grandfathers had built. Together, they have intro-duced innovations that have helped the brand expand beyond its local stronghold and across borders.

From Milk to Mithai

In 1939, Bhaskar Ganesh Chitale started a dairy business in the town of Bhilawadi. Initially focused on milk production, the enterprise gathered pace over the next decade when his sons RB Chitale and NB Chitale expanded the business in a different direction.

“From 1950, Chitale Bandhu started selling milk products like khowa, chakka. As there was enormous response, we started making traditional sweets like barfi and laddoo. My grandfather and his younger brother started Chitale Bandhu Mithaiwale and launched our first shop,” says Kedar, the eldest in the current generation.

The evolution from a modest dairy operation to a household name and a presence in overseas markets has been anything but easy. But it has been able to refute the old Chinese proverb of a “three-generation rule” that claims that family businesses rarely survive beyond the third generation.