ITC's ₹645 Crore Buyout of Yoga Bar's Parent, Explained

Quick answer: On September 28, 2026, ITC bought the remaining 52.5% of Sproutlife Foods Private Limited, the company behind the Yoga Bar brand, for roughly ₹645 crore in cash. Sproutlife is now a wholly owned ITC subsidiary. The deal is the final payment in a buyout ITC first agreed in January 2023, and the valuation math across the three payments is the most interesting part of it.

Key Takeaways

• Status: completed. ITC owns 100% of Sproutlife Foods (Yoga Bar) as of September 28, 2026.
• ITC paid in three stages: ₹175 crore (39.4%), ₹80 crore (to 47.5%) and ₹645 crore (remaining 52.5%), close to ₹900 crore in total by our own addition.
• Implied valuation rose from about ₹444 crore to about ₹1,229 crore, while revenue grew faster, so ITC paid less per rupee of revenue at the end than at the start.
• Buying in stages with later prices tied to performance is an idea smaller buyers can borrow.

The Brand Behind the Headline

Yoga Bar was founded in 2014 in Bengaluru by sisters Suhasini and Anindita Sampath Kumar, who wanted to make protein bars, muesli, and breakfast cereals without added sugar or artificial ingredients. Like a lot of Indian D2C brands, it grew up online and on quick-commerce apps before building a real presence in physical stores. By the time ITC first came knocking in 2023, Yoga Bar's parent company, Sproutlife Foods, was doing an annualised run rate the founders themselves put at "over ₹100 crore."

How ITC Bought Sproutlife Foods: A Secondary Purchase

ITC bought 13,445 shares of Sproutlife (each with a face value of ₹10) directly from the company's existing shareholders. In deal terms, that's called a secondary purchase: money changing hands between shareholders, rather than the company issuing brand-new shares to raise fresh capital. That purchase took ITC's stake from about 47.5% to a full 100%. No government or regulatory approval was needed, and ITC confirmed this wasn't a transaction with a related party, meaning nobody on ITC's side had a personal stake in Sproutlife that could create a conflict of interest.

ITC Yoga Bar Deal Timeline: Three Years, Three Payments

What makes this deal worth actually understanding, rather than just reading the headline number, is that ITC never intended to pay for Yoga Bar all at once. In January 2023, it signed a binding agreement to buy the whole company over three to four years, in stages:

Stage one, early 2023. ITC paid ₹175 crore for 39.4% of the company, through a mix of buying newly issued shares and existing ones. At the time, the Sampath Kumar sisters said, "We are delighted to join hands with ITC in Yoga Bar's next phase of growth," pointing to ITC's distribution network and supply chain as the reason a young D2C brand would want a giant FMCG partner instead of staying independent.

Stage two, sometime after. A further ₹80 crore took ITC's stake to 47.5%. The original 2023 plan expected this to happen by March 2025. It actually landed around April 2026, roughly a year later than planned. Deals like this often slip on timing even when everything else goes to plan, and this is a small, real example of that.

Stage three, September 28, 2026. The final ₹645 crore bought the remaining 52.5% and closed the deal.

Add those three numbers up and ITC has paid close to ₹900 crore in total for a business it first invested in when it was doing barely ₹100 crore a year. That ₹900 crore figure is worth being clear about: it's our own addition of the three disclosed amounts, not a number ITC itself has ever stated as one lump sum.

What the Valuation Math Shows: ITC Paid Less per Rupee of Revenue

Here's a simple way to see how much more valuable Yoga Bar became between the first payment and the last. If ₹175 crore bought 39.4% of the company in 2023, you can work out roughly what the whole company was worth at that moment by dividing one by the other: ₹175 crore divided by 39.4% works out to a company worth about ₹444 crore. Do the same thing with the final payment: ₹645 crore divided by 52.5% works out to a company worth about ₹1,229 crore.

That's the company's value going up by almost 2.8 times over three years. Normally that alone would tell you the business had a great run. But look at what actually happened to Sproutlife's revenue over the same stretch: from an annualised run rate of "over ₹100 crore" in 2023 to a confirmed ₹452 crore in the financial year ending March 2026, which is up from ₹200 crore the year before that, and ₹108 crore the year before that. Revenue alone grew by more than four times.

Put the two together and something interesting shows up: the price ITC was effectively paying for each rupee of Sproutlife's revenue actually went down, from roughly 4.4 times revenue at the first payment to roughly 2.7 times revenue at the last one. In plain terms, Sproutlife grew into its own valuation and then kept growing past it. ITC ended up paying less per rupee of sales for a much bigger, faster-growing business than it did for a small, unproven one three years earlier. That's the opposite of what usually happens when a big company buys a hot young brand, and it's the one genuinely interesting fact buried in this deal that the wire coverage hasn't pulled out.

Why Indian FMCG Giants Buy D2C Brands in Stages

Yoga Bar wasn't a one-off for ITC. It was ITC's third D2C brand investment by the time the 2023 deal was announced, and it fits a much bigger pattern across Indian FMCG. Marico has bought five digital-first brands over the past few years, including Beardo, Plix, and, most recently, 4700BC and Cosmix. Hindustan Unilever paid ₹2,706 crore, about eight times revenue, for the skincare brand Minimalist. Emami spent seven years slowly buying out The Man Company before taking it fully in-house. Big, slow-moving FMCG companies have realised they're better at scaling a brand than inventing one from scratch, and buying in stages lets them commit early to a promising founder-led brand without having to bet the full price on a business that's still unproven.

What This Means If You're Buying a Much Smaller Business

You don't need ITC's size or its money to use the same idea. If you're looking at a target whose growth story sounds good but is hard to verify, paying one fixed price upfront forces you to make a bet: either you pay for growth that might not show up, or you lowball a seller whose business genuinely takes off right after you buy it. Structuring the deal in stages, an initial stake now with the rest priced against how the business actually performs over the next year or two, protects you from the first problem while still letting the seller earn more if they deliver. It's the exact same logic as an earnout clause. ITC just did it by signing three separate share purchases instead of one contract with a deferred payment built in.