There is a particular kind of entrepreneurial clarity that comes not from a eureka moment, but from years of watching the same problem repeat itself across hundreds of different rooms.
"I've spent fifteen years walking into stores and asking the same question: why does this feel forgettable?" says Saurabh Mehdiratta, Founder and CEO of Poodyno. “At some point, I stopped asking it for other brands and started asking it for myself.”
The Long Road to the Right Idea
Mehdiratta is not the kind of founder who stumbled into entrepreneurship on a whim. A commerce graduate of Delhi University with a Bachelor of Information Technology (BIT) and MBA from Manipal University, he spent nearly a decade in advertising and media sales before making his first entrepreneurial move. He briefly ventured into the import-export sector, which he describes, without romanticising it, as "the most operationally honest education I've ever had."
In 2013, he founded Ozeca, a retail branding and visual merchandising agency based in New Delhi. What started as a small operation in South Delhi grew, over a decade, into one of India's credible names in its domain: 500+ clients including Fortune 500 corporations, pan-India execution across 300+ cities, and an international footprint spanning South Asia, the Middle East, and East Asia. Ozeca has built store environments for luxury brands, executed airport lounge installations, and delivered large-scale retail campaigns across geographies that most agencies of its size don't reach.
"Ozeca taught me how retail actually works from the inside," Mehdiratta says. "Not the theory of it, but the actual physics. Why people stop, why they stay, why they come back. That knowledge is not something you learn from a strategy document. You learn it by building a few hundred stores."
India's Ice Cream Market: The Format Problem Nobody Solved
While running Ozeca, Mehdiratta was paying close attention to India's food and beverage landscape, not as a casual observer, but as someone who had executed in-store environments for F&B clients and watched, at close range, what worked and what didn't.
The picture he saw was consistent: a frozen dessert category growing strongly on paper, but almost entirely stagnant in format.
According to TechSci Research, India's frozen dessert market was valued at USD 4.86 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach USD 9.25 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 11.32%. IMARC Group puts the ice cream market alone at INR 312.76 billion in 2025, forecast to grow at a CAGR of 16.03% through 2034. The macro story is compelling by any measure.
But what the numbers don't capture is what Mehdiratta noticed on the ground: every player in the category, from market leaders to the medium segment and the emerging artisanal brands, were competing on flavour range, price point, and distribution reach. None of them were competing on experience.
"India's ice cream industry has built an outstanding product category and a completely forgettable retail experience," he says. "You walk in, you point at a flavour, you pay, you leave. No dwell time. No brand world. No reason to return beyond the product itself. That's not a flavour problem. That's a format problem, and format problems are where categories get rewritten."
Enter the Dinosaur
The concept Mehdiratta arrived at is, on the surface, disarmingly playful: a dinosaur-themed ice cream brand, complete with handcrafted dino-shaped waffle cones, a rotating menu of fusion flavours, immersive prehistoric retail environments, and a live dinosaur ride at every outlet except for the kiosks.
Operated under Jurassic Frozen Fossil Private Limited, Poodyno launched its first outlet at Mannat Haveli, Kurukshetra, on National Highway 44, followed within thirty days by a second location at Mannat Sitara, near Pipli, Karnal, also on NH44, the primary Delhi-Chandigarh corridor.
The choice to describe Poodyno as merely "playful," however, undersells the business architecture underneath it.
The dinosaur-shaped waffle cone is a proprietary, first-in-India SKU, a product that delivers instant, wordless differentiation at the point of sale. The fusion flavour menu, globally inspired profiles engineered for the Indian palate with seasonal specials and limited drops, is designed with the cadence of a fine-dining programme: intentional, layered, and built to drive return visits. The prehistoric retail environment and the live dino ride are not decorative; they are the mechanisms that generate dwell time, organic user content, and the kind of emotional association that traditional ice cream brands spend enormous marketing budgets trying to manufacture.
"The experience is the product," Mehdiratta says simply. "Everything else follows from that."
Why the Highway, Not the Mall
One of the more counterintuitive decisions in Poodyno's early story is where it chose to launch, not in a metro mall or a high-street location, but on a national highway, embedded within established hospitality properties.
It is a decision that reveals the strategic discipline behind the brand's apparently spontaneous energy.
NH44, the Delhi-Ambala-Chandigarh corridor, carries a daily flow of commuters, families on weekend drives, pilgrims travelling to Kurukshetra, and tourists headed to Himachal Pradesh and Punjab. Both Poodyno locations sit at high-footfall hospitality properties that already attract this traffic. The brand benefits from the existing pull of the venues while adding a significant new draw of its own.
According to Knight Frank's research, more than 38% of all new F&B store leases in India were signed in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities in 2023. Grant Thornton Bharat's research notes that 94% of restaurant operators now plan to expand within Tier-2 cities or into new ones, drawn by rental economics that can be one-tenth of prime metro rates and a consumer base that is increasingly brand-aware and experience-hungry.
"Everyone is chasing the metro mall. While I am not entirely against it and we might someday plan to have our presence in malls, but right now as a new entrant in the market I strongly feel that the real opportunity is on the highways between them," Mehdiratta says. "NH44 alone gives us access to millions of travellers who are already stopping, and who now have a reason to stop specifically for us. That's a captive, high-frequency, multi-demographic audience that no urban F&B format can replicate."
Two outlets, one corridor, thirty days: Mehdiratta describes it as "a deliberate velocity signal."
What the First Month Has Shown
Poodyno is, by any measure, an early-stage brand. It has been operating for just over a month. Mehdiratta is careful not to overstate what that means.
But the consumer behaviour patterns emerging from the Kurukshetra outlet are, he says, validating the structural thesis in ways that matter.
"We're seeing what I'd call a multi-generational pull," he explains. "Children are dragging their parents toward the outlet. Teenagers are creating content without being asked, quality content, the kind you can't brief an agency to produce. And millennial parents are treating the visit as an occasion, not an impulse. That trifecta of kids, Gen Z, and millennial parents is exactly what we designed for."
Critically, the brand is building visibility without paid media. The dino-shaped cone and the ride experience are functioning as organic content infrastructure, producing social impressions through consumer behaviour rather than advertising spend.
"When customers create content for your brand without being prompted, that's not luck," Mehdiratta says. "That's structural market fit. And that's a very different thing from manufactured momentum."
Poodyno Franchise: Opportunity for Tier-2 Cities and Highway Locations
Poodyno's scaling vehicle is a franchise model, designed, in Mehdiratta’s words, as a “turnkey experiential retail system.”
For a prospective franchise partner, the package includes brand identity, supply chain access, retail environment standards, and marketing support, structured for entrepreneurs in Tier-2 cities and highway locations where premium F&B penetration remains low and consumer appetite is demonstrably rising. According to Boston Consulting Group, Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities are expected to account for over 45% of India's GDP growth in the coming years, and the Franchise Association of India projects the franchising sector to grow at 30-35% per year.
For franchise investors, Mehdiratta makes the case directly: "This is a high-experience, high-margin, low-saturation proposition. You're getting first-mover category advantage in a market that is structurally growing, with a retail system built by someone who has spent fifteen years doing exactly this for other brands. The difference is that this time, it's ours."
The Larger Ambition
Ask Mehdiratta where Poodyno goes from here, and his answer is both specific and expansive.
In the immediate term: franchise expansion across Tier-2 cities and NH44-adjacent hospitality properties in North India. In the medium term, a national footprint that makes Poodyno the default answer to the question of where you stop when you're driving somewhere worth going. In the long term, something more significant.
"The Indian highway has been a place you stop because you have to," he says. "We want Poodyno to be a place people plan their drive around. That shift from obligation to destination is what we're actually building toward."
It is an ambitious framing for a brand with two outlets and thirty days of trading history. But then, Mehdiratta has spent fifteen years watching what happens when someone builds a retail environment with genuine intention behind it. He has seen, at close range, the difference between a space that people pass through and one that people remember.
Poodyno, he is clear, is designed to be the latter.
"We're not building another ice cream brand," he says. "We're building a category. And in this market, at this moment, with this team and this model, I genuinely believe we're early."
Poodyno is operated by Jurassic Frozen Fossil Private Limited, founded by Saurabh Mehdiratta. The brand currently operates two outlets on National Highway 44, Haryana.
StartupTalky- Business News, Insights and StoriesSakshi Jadhav
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