Twenty-seven of thirty-five new stores reordered in week one, and KANJI+ is calling that its offline proof

Hitesh Sharma has nominated himself for the Q3 awards on the strength of a single retail sprint in Delhi NCR.

KANJI+ sells kanji, the fermented drink that has sat in Indian kitchens for generations, in an 80 ml ready-to-drink probiotic shot. Founder Hitesh Sharma writes that the aim is to make an old gut-health habit convenient enough to keep, and the brand runs it through three channels at once: direct-to-consumer, subscriptions, and offline retail.

The retail leg is what he is putting forward this quarter. In one expansion sprint, Sharma reports that KANJI+ added 35 stores across Delhi NCR, and that 27 of them asked for refills inside the first week. That is roughly three in four stores reordering before the second week began, which he reads as early validation of repeat offline demand rather than one-time shelf curiosity.

Alongside the sprint, he reports sales of about ₹2 lakh and more than 400 customers served, with continued work on the subscription model, packaging, and retail execution.

The nomination itself is framed less as a victory lap than as evidence of pace. "I'm not nominating myself because KANJI+ has already made it," Sharma writes. "I'm nominating myself because Q3 proved that we can execute."

He is candid that the company is still early. The stated case is that the quarter was spent executing rather than planning: an idea and early D2C validation taken into real-world retail, customer behaviour tested, refill signals collected, product and packaging improved, distribution model iterated. Progress that is measurable, in his words, even if the scale is not yet there.

Sharma also positions his community participation as part of the same argument. He writes that he shares the working and the failing parts of building KANJI+ in the open, through Unhu discussions, founder conversations and feedback, and that the value he has taken from the community has been the chance to learn from other founders instead of building in isolation. His stated test for that value is whether the conversations turn into execution rather than contacts.

What comes next is a distribution question. The priorities he lists are wider retail presence, stronger subscriptions, better packaging, additional SKUs under test, and a sales engine that can repeat itself across Delhi NCR. The milestone he is aiming at is 500 paid subscribers, and past that, KANJI+ recognised as an Indian functional beverage brand rather than a regional experiment.

~Editor

Shobhit Mehandiratta