[100 Emerging Women Leaders] This Mizo entrepreneur’s farm-to-bottle startup offers craft sodas with flavours of the Northeast

After 15 years of being in the US working in the infrastructure technology sector in companies like Morgan Stanley and American Express, Zomawii Khiangte returned to her home state, Mizoram, in 2016.

The move was prompted by a decision to be close to her parents who were ageing and also unwell. 

Interestingly, in this decision, her American husband, Felipe Rodriguez, whom she had met in college, saw an opportunity to translate his passion for home brewing on a larger scale by setting up a brewery in the state.

Rodriguez had enough product management experience in multinationals like Unilever to take this dream through.

“It was a time when craft breweries had started to gain a lot of popularity in the country. Together, we decided to set up the first craft brewery in the Northeast, and called our brand, Local Beer,” Khiangte tells HerStory.

The couple ran the brewery profitably for three years until a change of government put paid to their plans. Their licence was not renewed and the production facility in Aizawl shut down. They continued to brew Local Beer in Bhutan for a while for distribution in Assam and Meghalaya but another big blow came in the form of the Covid-19 pandemic. The business now had shut down completely.

Sodas with natural goodness

The couple took a pause from their business dreams and went back to the drawing board. They came up with the idea of natural sodas infused with the goodness of agricultural produce of the Northeast. 

This resulted in the launch of Local All Natural under their company Tui Bon Natural in December 2021. A non-alcoholic beverage line, it features the unique flavours of Northeast India through craft sodas made from indigenous and locally sourced fruits like pomelo, roselle, orange, and dragon fruit. Tui Bon in Mizoram translates into ‘very tasty’ and Khiangte says her husband chose the name because it has a very French ring to it.

The Local All Natural line, the Khiangte believes, is distinct because it addresses multiple factors.

“We realised there was a huge gap between food production and marketing. The farmers were producing so much, but did not have access to proper food processing and didn’t know how to market their products. At the time, the beverage market was booming and we thought of taking the agricultural produce that was available locally and convert them into beverages,” Khiangte says.

She also points out that citrus fruits and high-quality ginger grow abundantly in the wild in Mizoram.

“We wanted to produce a premium craft soda with these natural flavours and sell them in glass bottles, instead of using plastic,” she adds. In essence, All Local All Natural sodas, she believes, bring flair to “boring old juice.” For the initial launch, the couple chose orange, ginger ale and pomelo, a kind of grape fruit. The produced is sourced from farmers across the region.

The craft sodas are not entirely preservative or sugar free, and Khiangte says the ginger ale comes low in sugar. 

Looking at different markets

She understands that sodas and the beverage market is a competitive one and has positioned All Local All Natural as a stand-alone product and also a mixer.

“In fact, our pomelo soda that is infused with hibiscus tastes very good with gin,” she says.

They started testing the product in the local market in small batches, honing the recipes along the way. 

“Our approach is mostly community-based. We don’t want go the mass production way but tap into demographics and understand their needs. We have been organising our own events with musicians and promoting the product. In this way, we bring new talents to the fore and also market our line,” Khiangte explains. In a short period, the brand has become popular in the northeast.

With a recent launch in Bengaluru, All Local All Natural is hoping to cash in on a new and bigger market. 

“We organised a few events and received a good response. We are also trying to get into quick commerce throughout the country. We also understood tastes differ–in Delhi, people like ginger ale a lot and in Bengaluru, people prefer the citrus flavours. This will help us in understanding markets better,” she says.

If the market in Bengaluru takes off, they are planning to take the contract manufacturing route. The products are also available on Amazon. It costs Rs 570 for a pack of six bottles of soda.

Despite these, she is confident that the infusion of funds will enable the brand to ramp up production, introduce new flavours, and scale distribution.

After bootstrapping through their brewery business and setting up Tui Bon Naturals, the couple recently concluded a pre-seed fundraise at a valuation of $1.25 million. the fundraise was facilitated by Alsisar Impact, a leading frontier markets incubator in the North-East and Himalayan region. It attracted key impact and angel investors, including award-winning author and journalist Shoba Narayan, Unitus Capital Chairman Narayan Ramachandran, Mumbai-based industrialist Aditya Sheth, and Sonali Mehta-Rao of Ahaana Ventures. 

In Aizawl at their unit, a team of six oversee operations and around 30 people are involved in the production process. 

“Production costs are higher here because of multiple challenges--lack of infrastructure, the terrain, delivery issues and skilled labour. For instance, if a machine breaks down, it takes a longer time to get a skilled technician to repair it,” Khiangte says.

While competition is rife, she believes that All Local All Natural’s unique twist to sodas with flavours of the Northeast will be its winning edge. 

“We are promoting a whole region while offering high quality ingredients in a beverage. There’s a story with every bottle you are drinking from--where you can trace it back to the farms you are sourcing it from,” she says, as she signs off.