With over a year of negotiations and tailor-focused export support, Estonian food brand Bon Vegan has made its first export to Mumbai, India, debuting on the world’s biggest vegan market.
Cherished at home, Estonian food is steadily gaining ground in foreign markets. It took more than a year, two trade missions, and a lot of patience — but Estonian plant-based food producer Bon Vegan has made it onto the Indian market. The company’s first container of nutritional yeast recently departed for Mumbai.
For Bon Vegan’s CEO Karin Miller, India had been on the radar for years. The synergy was there: nearly 40% of India’s population is vegetarian — the largest vegetarian community in the world in absolute numbers — making it a natural target for a company that produces exclusively plant-based products. “It felt like a dream customer base,” Miller said to Enterprise Estonia. The reality, as she discovered, was considerably more complicated.
Cold emails don’t open Indian doors
Bon Vegan did its homework early, identifying suitable distributors independently. But getting those distributors to respond was another matter. “It is nearly impossible for a small Estonian company to reach a major Indian distributor simply by sending an e-mail,” Miller says.
That’s where Estonia’s institutional support network proved indispensable. The Enterprise Estonia export adviser for India, Vinod Basliyal, facilitated introductions that helped Bon Vegan to break through in the new territory. Enterprise Estonia also organised trade delegations that allowed Miller and her team to pitch in person, something she considers critical to eventual success.
“The ability to go there, tell your story, and demonstrate your product in a context where potential partners could see the backing of the Estonian state, the embassy, and Enterprise Estonia — that made us credible,” she said. The Estonian embassy in New Delhi was also actively involved throughout the process.
Quality over price
Miller is frank about what Estonian exporters can and cannot offer in a market like India. Competing on price is not an option. “Estonia is no longer a low-cost manufacturing country. We cannot enter a major agricultural producer like India on price. We need genuine innovation and unmatched quality,” she said.
Bon Vegan’s entry product — nutritional yeast — fits that brief. Nutritional yeast is a deactivated yeast used as a flavouring and nutritional supplement, popular in plant-based cooking for its savoury, cheese-like taste. Miller argues that Estonia’s production environment — clean soil, air and water — gives its version an edge no other country can replicate. The product also contains a naturally occurring form of vitamin D produced by the yeast itself under UV light, which Miller describes as unique on the global market.
Negotiations to be mastered
The path to that first shipment included negotiations that, at several points, seemed to have stalled entirely. “I can honestly say we were not prepared for negotiations this long. On multiple occasions, it felt like the partner simply wasn’t interested,” Miller said. Navigating cultural differences in communication style and decision-making tempo turned out to be as important as the product itself.
The first shipment is a test rather than a triumph, she insists. How Indian consumers respond to a premium-priced, unfamiliar product remains to be seen. But as a commercial foothold in one of the world’s largest markets, it represents exactly the kind of incremental, hard-won progress that export growth is built on. “If you cannot grow your volumes to meet demand in a market this large, it is not worth investing the time and money to open the door in the first place,” she advices.
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