How Xpert Mapped Naturals Ice Cream's Next Outlets
Background
Naturals Ice Cream is one of India's best-known ice cream brands, built on a simple promise of real fruit and natural ingredients. It sells its ice creams through its own parlours, run largely through a franchise model, with more than 170 outlets across over 40 cities. The brand sits at the premium end of everyday indulgence, and its parlours have long been a familiar stop in high streets and neighbourhood markets, especially in Mumbai, Pune and Bengaluru. With a strong brand and a steady franchise pipeline, Naturals is opening new outlets every year, so the question it faces is not whether to expand but exactly where each new parlour should go, and in which city first.
Challenge Faced
Naturals' network had grown the way most franchise networks grow: through available real estate, franchisee preference and familiarity with a corridor. New sites usually arrived as a locality someone had already picked, and the team then had to judge whether it would work. The expansion team wanted the reverse. They wanted to be told which areas to look at first, based on where their buyers actually live. They also had two firm conditions. A new outlet must not cannibalise an existing parlour nearby, and any model used to choose sites had to agree with the sales their current stores were already making. Population counts, footfall estimates and rental benchmarks could not answer either condition, because none of them say who actually buys ice cream and desserts.
Xpert's Strategy Undertaken
Xpert started with buyers, not the city map. Using anonymised purchase records across more than 1,000 brands, it identified verified buyers of ice cream, desserts and the categories around them, and mapped where they live, pincode by pincode, in Bengaluru and Pune. It then placed every existing Naturals outlet on that map to measure how much of each city's buying demand the current network already reached. Every candidate area was ranked only on the new buyers it would add beyond existing parlours, which built cannibalisation into the ranking itself. Finally, Xpert scored each location out of 10 on buyers, nearby retail, distance to the retail cluster, landmarks such as schools and colleges, and road access, and fitted those scores to the sales of 156 Naturals stores.
Results Achieved
In Bengaluru, Naturals' 15 outlets reached 21.9% of the city's 10.1 lakh verified buyers. Xpert ranked ten opportunity areas that together lift that reach to 44%, doubling the share of the city's buyers living near a Naturals parlour. In Pune, its 20 outlets reached 29.4% of 5.19 lakh buyers, and five new sites take that to 40.7%. The location score tracked real sales across 156 stores: the top third of stores by score sold a median of ₹4.3 Cr a year, against ₹2.4 Cr for the bottom third. That gave every proposed area a revenue range drawn from comparable Naturals stores, and the team now works from a live dashboard with the top new sites for each city.
Inferences & Insights
The Naturals work shows that a store network built on real estate availability can look complete and still miss most of its city's buyers. Measuring reach as a share of all verified buyers turns expansion from a list of tempting localities into a plan with a clear target. Ranking areas only on the new buyers they add makes cannibalisation visible before a lease is signed, not after a sister outlet's sales fall. And because the score is fitted to the brand's own store sales, the model earns trust the simplest way, by explaining stores the team already knows well. For franchise-led brands in food, beauty and retail, the lesson is that the best next site is decided by demand first and property second.
Ten new outlets ranked by Xpert would double Naturals Ice Cream's buyer reach in Bengaluru, from 21.9% to 44%, without eating into its existing stores.
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