Chitale
An Indian sweets brand with over 8 decades of heritage entering two international markets with a sharper positioning than anyone else in the category.
Category
Indian Sweets & Snacks
Key focus
International expansion & SEO
Year
Platforms
Shopify (US), Wix (UK)
The Challenge
Chitale is one of India's most loved sweets and snacks brands. Founded in 1939, it has spent over 8 decades becoming a name that carries real emotional weight. For Indians living abroad, Chitale isn't just a brand. It's a memory. The Bakarwadi from a childhood Diwali. The Shankarpali their grandmother kept in a tin.
The opportunity in the US and UK was clear. Indian families in these markets were already searching for the brand and buying it through unofficial channels. Indian grocery shelves with limited stock, scattered importers, friends bringing it back in suitcases. But Chitale had no proper ecommerce presence to convert that demand.
The bigger problem was positioning. Both markets are crowded with brands competing on generic "Indian sweets" keywords. Gupta's (since 1985), Pandit UK (since 2010), Indian Basket (since 2019). Going head-to-head on the same broad ground would have been an expensive fight with no real edge.
But Chitale isn't a generic Indian brand. It's a Maharashtrian one, with proprietary recipes for signature regional products like Bakarwadi and Shankarpali that almost no competitor abroad makes authentically. That regional specificity wasn't a limitation. It was the unlock.
Our Approach
We built Chitale across two markets with one shared positioning and two separate commerce stacks.
The positioning came first. Authentic Maharashtrian, not generic Indian. Where competitors fought for "Indian sweets" search traffic, Chitale would own the niche underneath it. Maharashtrian sweets. Authentic Bakarwadi. Real Shankarpali. The terms the most loyal buyers were already searching.
United States, Shopify. We built chitaleamericas.com from the ground up on Shopify, the platform best suited for shipping food across US states. Beyond catalog and storytelling, we built in three conversion features tuned to how this brand actually sells. A store locator for buyers who want to find Chitale in physical retail. A become a seller flow for distributors and grocers wanting to stock the brand. A corporate orders option for bulk and gifting demand, which is significant for a heritage brand around festival season.
United Kingdom, Wix. We built the UK store on Wix for tighter control over technical SEO, which matters more in a market where organic search drives most heritage-brand discovery. Underneath the storefront, we executed a full technical pass. Google Analytics and Search Console setup. Robots.txt fix. Meta titles and descriptions across every page. Alt text on the full image library. Broken link cleanup. 301 redirects. Schema markup. Speed and performance optimization.
The UK build was tuned to win Maharashtrian-specific search terms the bigger players had left open. Authentic Bakarwadi. Maharashtrian snacks UK. Traditional Shankarpali. Lower competition, higher intent.
Impact
2
International markets, 2 commerce stacks, 1 sharp positioning.
2
Websites built in Shopify and Wix
All
Maharashtrian-specific keyword strategy deployed
