Yakult India is reworking its marketing mix to drive trial and scale, even as infrastructure gaps and consumption habits slow its expansion beyond metro markets. MD Eiji Amano speaks to BW Marketing World on its double digit growth plans, why it is shifting TV spends to digital, hiking influencer spends, and whether a mini pack, mango flavour and cultural resonance can take probiotics beyond India’s top 10 cities
A 50:50 joint venture between Japan’s Yakult Honsha and France’s Groupe Danone, Yakult set up its India operations in 2005 and launched its chilled probiotic drink in the market in 2008. Nearly two decades on, it has built strong brand recognition in metropolitan cities. “Metro cities have more than 70 per cent awareness of the Yakult brand, it is spontaneous, it’s good for the last almost 18 years,” says Eiji Amano, Managing Director, Yakult India.
However, the mass adoption still remains limited. With revenues of around Rs 126 crore in FY25 and Indian probiotics market growing from Rs 1,016 crore in 2021 to Rs 2,070 crore in 2025, Yakult is eyeing a larger share and Amano is candid about what it will take.
The India Bet
To understand why probiotics haven’t scaled in India the way they have in Japan, Amano explains, “Yakult is 90 years old in Japan. It is a different market where functional foods were commonplace. People there grew up with a bottle of Yakult as a part of their daily diet.”
India, he says, is structurally different. “Most people believe that curd and traditional fermented foods are natural probiotics and therefore are not easily convinced by the concept of commercial products making the same claim.”
The pandemic, however, created an opening. Growing awareness around gut health and immunity has pushed more consumers toward functional foods. The category numbers bear this out — the near-doubling of the probiotics market between 2021 and 2025 is not an accident. “It is not surprising, therefore, that the Indian probiotics market has nearly doubled… It is currently growing at around 22 per cent annually and that is a big shift,” Amano notes.
Next Leg Of Growth
A limiting aspect of Yakult’s India operations is its distribution model. Summer, in particular, sharpens this challenge.
“We focus on temperature control because summer is very hot and the product must be chilled. So from the factory to your hand, it is always below 10 degrees. That is a big challenge in India,” he shares.
If the temperature rises, the live Lactobacillus casei bacteria die, and the product loses its core value proposition. “Once the temperature goes up, the bacteria is dead, so there is no point. We have that responsibility, and that is a challenge,” Amano says bluntly.
This constraint has directly shaped the company’s geographic footprint. Yakult has built its own proprietary chilled distribution infrastructure, currently spanning 35 distribution centres and over 20 distributors across tier 1 and tier 2 cities.
The more substantive education work, he says, happens through sampling, school and university health programmes, healthcare professional engagement, and factory tours. It’s an expensive, slow-to-build system, and it explains why the brand’s revenue remains concentrated in metros. Amano frames them as necessary – as a quality commitment and a barrier that competitors cannot easily replicate.
Yakult’s revenue base today skews premium. Amano is explicit about where the next leg of growth must come from: India’s emerging middle class. The signal move here is a new 2-bottle mini pack priced at Rs 36, introduced in the traditional trade or kirana channel. “With the upper and upper-middle-class population projected to triple by 2030, penetrating this promising segment is a strategic imperative,” he says.
Alongside pricing, the mango flavour launch, Yakult Light Mango, introduced in 2024 was a deliberate mass-market signal. “People may not know Yakult, but they know mango. They can imagine the taste of mango. So this is a good trial, an impulse trial too,” he shares. Since that launch, the company says it has maintained double-digit growth, which remains its target through 2030.
The Media Pivot
Until recently, Yakult India’s advertising was almost entirely television-driven and deliberately narrow.
“Our communication, like TV advertisements, is only limited to the 10 big cities because the density generates over 80-90 per cent of sales,” Amano says.
This year, the company shifted the majority of its television budget to digital. Campaigns are running across Meta, YouTube, Jio Cinema and other OTT platforms. Out-of-home and in-store merchandising round out the mix, though Amano is clear that the TV-level investment is not being replicated there.
On influencer marketing, the company is leaning in. “This year, we’re planning to invest more in influencer marketing as compared to last year, up by close to 25 to 30 per cent. Their endorsements are rooted in honest, first-hand experience rather than mere commercial interest,” he reveals. The emphasis, he says, is on health and wellness creators who are actual users of the product.
Brand ambassador Taapsee Pannu anchors the aspirational positioning, while the Shinchan collaboration targets younger consumers, a dual-track approach that tries to hold health credibility and pop-culture relevance simultaneously.
Yakult is now live on most quick commerce and ecommerce platforms, and Amano says the revenue contribution from these channels has seen a “significant surge.” He doesn’t break out exact figures, but the directional shift is clear of digital commerce becoming a meaningful part of the sales mix, not just an experimental channel.
For tier 2 and tier 3 expansion, the strategy is to leverage national modern trade chains and ecommerce platforms that already have infrastructure in these markets, rather than waiting for Yakult’s own cold chain to catch up.
Product Pipeline And What’s Next
Amano signals that new products are coming, shaped by consumer feedback and aimed at improving the nutritional profile without compromising the probiotic core. He declines to be specific, but points to market-driven R&D like the Yakult Light launch, lower sugar and calories, as the template.
On localisation, he makes a pointed claim stating, “Almost 100 per cent of our raw materials and sub-materials are sourced right here in India. We are literally putting ‘Make in India’ into practice.”
One asset in Yakult’s India operation is its direct-to-home delivery network, run by what the company calls “Yakult Ladies.” These are women who deliver the product door-to-door, building long-term relationships with households. It is, functionally, a first-party data collection system that predates the digital era.
As the company expands its digital and D2C channels, Amano says those ground-level relationships are being handled with care under India’s evolving Digital Personal Data Protection Act. “We treat the personal health and family insights shared during these interactions with the highest level of confidentiality,” he notes.
The gap between metro awareness and actual consumption, along with cold chain challenges and India’s strong curd habit, makes growth difficult. Amano acknowledges that this habit change is slow, and tier 3 expansion depends on limited infrastructure. While Yakult is making the moves, scaling execution to meet 2030 ambitions remains a key challenge.
What needs to change, in Amano’s telling, is scale – more cities, more channels, more price points, and more consumer education. The science, he insists is, “Yakult was launched in 1935 based on the philosophy that prevention is better than cure.” Getting India to believe that, at volume and outside the top 10 cities, is the work of the next five years.
