What it took for MasterChow to build a new category and claim 60% market share

“People would genuinely ask us, ‘Mirchi ka tel kyun bech rahe ho?’”

For Vidur Kataria, Co-founder of MasterChow, the question reflected the wider consumer scepticism that early chilli oil brands faced in India. Three years ago, chilli oil had little to no consumer vocabulary in India. Today, the landscape looks different, following years of consumer education by early entrants in the category.

But the chilli oil story is only one chapter in the brand's journey.

Before MasterChow existed, Kataria and his co-founder, Sidhanth Madan were running restaurants. In 2016, they launched Wok Me, an Asian QSR.

The idea for Wok Me was shaped by Kataria and Madan’s travels and exposure to different food cultures. Spending time across countries like Spain and China, gave the founders a first-hand sense of how Asian flavours were meant to taste. Back in India, they found that gap hard to ignore. Asian food, as it existed locally, was either heavily localised street fare or something reserved for fine-dining restaurants, with little in between.

Wok Me scaled to six outlets over four-and-a-half years, and expansion plans were underway, until Covid struck. Rising rent costs and prolonged shutdowns forced a rethink of the business.

The inflection point, Kataria noted, came through direct customer outreach during the lockdown. “Customers started calling us and saying, ‘We’re stuck at home and miss your flavour. Just send us the sauce,’” he recalled.

Within a week, Kataria said they had worked through the practicalities of turning a restaurant sauce into a retail product, naming the brand, designing packaging, sourcing bottles, and putting together a basic distribution setup. MasterChow emerged from that process.

The brand invested heavily in showing consumers how to use chilli oil, what it pairs with, and how it elevates everyday food. “We’ve spent years educating people, largely at our own expense,” he said.

That effort, he believes, laid the foundation for the crowded market seen today. “I’m proud to say that so much competition has come in because of us,” he said. “It tells you that what you’ve built is credible.”

Even now, he shared, education is ongoing. That long runway of education did not just shape the category, it also dictated how the brand needed to communicate in a crowded, fast-scrolling digital ecosystem.

Building recall in a cluttered feed

As the distribution evolved, its communication strategy followed suit, forcing the brand to rethink not just what it said, but who said it.

This shift also coincided with a move towards founder-led content. “We realised founder-led content works even better than celebrity-led content,” Kataria said. He has taken a more front-facing role, using social platforms to explain how the products are made, how they are meant to be used, and what differentiates their flavour profiles. 

The approach is designed to reduce friction for first-time buyers in a category that still requires explanation. 

More broadly, content, Kataria explains, has become less about polished storytelling and more about repetition, familiarity, and speed of recall in an increasingly cluttered digital environment.

The brand’s social communication is built around entertainment, often light and quirky. 

“Attention spans have reduced drastically,” Kataria said. “Content today has to either entertain, educate, or emotionally connect. We chose entertainment, specifically comedy.” 

That creative choice is supported by a high-frequency content strategy. “Content fatigue is real. Today, a message only registers if someone sees it four or five times. That’s why frequency is high, but the core message remains the same,” he explained.

But content alone could not shoulder the trust-building burden in a category where credibility still mattered as much as recall.

Building trust through a credible face

For MasterChow, the decision to partner with Chef Ranveer Brar was less about amplification and more about anchoring credibility, particularly in the early years when the category itself still required explanation.

The team began looking for a collaborator who could credibly stand for Asian flavours and cooking expertise, rather than simply front campaigns. “Chef Brar’s reputation for craftsmanship and his familiarity with flavour-led storytelling made the alignment feel organic. He is a master chef, known for his quality, flavours, and recipes,” Kataria said, adding that the tonal match mattered as much as the professional one.

The partnership evolved beyond endorsement. According to Kataria, the brand and Chef Brar have co-created sauces and worked closely on product and communication ideas, with the first year focused on establishing his association with the brand. 

MasterChow’s campaigns, including those with Ranveer Brar, lean into exaggerated situations built around disbelief that the food was made at home, a creative route he says has resonated with audiences.

When it comes to measurement, Kataria shared that the traditional ROI was not the primary lens. “For us, it’s not a return on investment but a return on trust,” he said. That trust, he said, translated into softer but significant outcomes, opening up new geographies, expanding the brand’s audience base, and helping MasterChow build a more engaged community of food-first consumers.

That layer of trust then had to be amplified at scale, through a marketing mix designed to convert familiarity into purchase.

That content strategy sits within a marketing mix that is heavily digital by design. “About 90% of our marketing is online. We split it between branding and performance,” he said. Performance-led spends are concentrated on sales-driven platforms such as quick commerce and marketplaces, while brand investments are timed more strategically.

Kataria explained that brand visibility is deliberately pushed towards the latter half of the month, between the 20th and 30th to influence purchase decisions during the high-consumption window that typically follows payday, between the 1st and 10th. 

Behind that content and channel strategy sits a deliberately structured budgeting approach. MasterChow plans its marketing spends on a quarterly basis, anchored to reach, viewership, and sales targets. Kataria frames the brand’s current phase as one that still requires sustained investment.

“We’re in a growth phase, building a ₹500-crore brand,” he said. “That needs heavy investment because we’re a push category, not pull, yet. The moment push turns into pull, that’s when the real success comes.”

Consumption, he noted, remains relatively stable through the year, with only marginal seasonality. Winter typically delivers a mild uplift, but demand is more closely tied to consumer mood, particularly cravings for spicy and Asian food, which can drive a 10-15% lift at certain points.

This planning discipline feeds directly into how and where MasterChow deploys its spends, setting the stage for the brand’s increasing tilt towards quick commerce as both a sales and marketing lever.

Quick commerce

Food, Kataria argues, behaves differently from most consumer categories. It is driven less by planning and more by immediacy. This insight gradually reshaped how MasterChow thought about distribution and marketing.

Early on, the brand’s direct-to-consumer model was constrained by delivery timelines. “Our D2C delivery used to take four or five days,” Kataria said. “Then Amazon came with next-day delivery. And then quick commerce said they will deliver in 10 minutes.”

As faster fulfilment became the norm, marketing priorities followed distribution. According to Kataria, quick commerce platforms began delivering significantly higher traffic volumes than the brand’s own website, even as they came with steeper commissions. The trade-off, he suggested, became difficult to ignore.

“It makes more sense to spend a lot more on quick commerce than on our own D2C website,” he said. MasterChow’s advertising spends on these platforms currently sit in the range of 12-15%, Kataria clarified.

Kataria claims that MasterChow currently holds over 60% market share in the chilli oil segment, a position he attributes to early category education and strong visibility on quick commerce platforms. More than a scale marker, he sees it as proof that the brand’s early focus on education, frequency, and distribution has translated into repeat behaviour.

The next phase, however, is less about defending a single category and more about extending those learnings. MasterChow is preparing to expand into snacking and what Kataria describes as “better-for-you indulgence” products, while increasing focus on Tier II and Tier III markets. 

“Tier I already knows MasterChow,” he said. “Now it’s about widening the base."