In India, desserts carry the flavours of history and nostalgia, and a new wave of brands is making sure they look as captivating as they taste. These design-forward Indian dessert makers blend classic recipes with fresh creativity, wrapping each treat with love in a compelling story and eye-catching aesthetics.
From reimagined mithai in chic, art-inspired boxes to ice creams that channel heritage through packaging and flavour, each brand is redefining how we experience sweets. Below, we introduce six such brands and explore how each marries design, storytelling, and food innovation in its unique way.
Pistabarfi
Pistabarfi, relaunched by two brothers from their grandfather’s 1968 mithai shop, marries nostalgia with a modern sensibility. Based in Mumbai, this cloud-kitchen brand offers time-honoured sweets with balanced flavours and minimal sweetness, all wrapped in striking, artist-designed packaging. The Agrawal brothers collaborate with Indian folk and contemporary artists for each design, turning every mithai box into a storytelling canvas. They even reimagine classics in new forms, like moulding kaju katli into a chocolate-style bar that snaps into pieces, while preserving authentic ingredients. Through these creative twists, Pistabarfi revives the old-world charm of Indian sweets in a way that resonates across generations.
Pistabarfi
Indu Ice Cream
Indu Ice Cream is a Mumbai-based artisanal ice cream brand that infuses Indian heritage into every scoop. Founded by chef and food storyteller Saloni Kukreja, Indu takes inspiration from traditional desserts and flavors, even its name nods to the Indus Valley civilization, linking back to India’s roots. The brand’s most eye-catching feature is its packaging: each ice cream comes enveloped in vibrant Jaipur block prints, blending old-world craft with a fun modern vibe. In terms of taste, Indu offers nostalgic Indian flavors (think malai, jaggery, or seasonal fruits) with a contemporary twist, all made in small batches with clean, high-quality ingredients. This combination of design and dessert innovation creates a delightful journey down memory lane for a new generation of ice cream lovers.
Indu Ice Cream
Bombay Sweet Shop
Bombay Sweet Shop is a contemporary mithai boutique that celebrates India’s sweet traditions with imaginative flair. Launched in Mumbai by the team behind The Bombay Canteen & Veronica's, this brand scoured the country for classic recipes and then reinvented them as gourmet treats for the modern palate. The results range from chocolate-butterscotch barfi barks to coffee-infused rasgulla tiramisu, familiar sweets reborn in playful new avatars. Matching the innovative flavors is a thoughtful design aesthetic: the shop’s logo and décor borrow from Mumbai’s Art Deco heritage, and its packaging pays homage to the city’s icons (chocolate wrappers even feature motifs from Byculla’s Rani Baug Zoo). Every detail from vintage-style mithai tins to personalized ‘wrapping station’ counters, is crafted to evoke nostalgia and joy, turning a visit to Bombay Sweet Shop into a trip down memory lane.
Bombay Sweet Shop
Khoya
Founded in 2016 by Sid Mathur, Khoya set out to revive India’s time-honoured confections at a premium level, crafting each piece by hand with natural ingredients and zero preservatives. The brand’s philosophy is to honour tradition, drawing inspiration from old royal kitchens and forgotten heritage sweet shops, while elevating presentation to a contemporary luxe standard. Every sweet comes beautifully packaged like a jewel; the understated boxes and impeccable plating make the experience feel celebratory and exclusive. By marrying cultural nostalgia with refined craftsmanship and modern aesthetics, Khoya has turned classic mithai into coveted gourmet treasures for the modern connoisseur.
Khoya
NOTO
Founded in 2019 by a husband-and-wife duo, NOTO Healthy Ice Cream set out to prove that a sweet treat can be indulgent without the guilt. This Mumbai-based brand specializes in low-calorie, no-added-sugar ice creams that don’t skimp on flavour or creamy texture. Its visual identity is fresh and playful, each flavour comes in a colour-coded tub adorned with clean illustrations of the star ingredients, plus a bold display of the calorie count right on the lid. Unlike many ‘diet’ foods, NOTO’s packaging isn’t sterile or overly minimalist; it’s sprinkled with confetti-like graphics and vibrant hues to put fun and flavour first, even as it highlights the health benefits. By making healthy eating feel joyous and familiar, NOTO is reshaping Indian dessert culture one guilt-free scoop at a time.
NOTO
Ether
Ether Atelier is a Mumbai-based luxury chocolaterie that treats confectionery as high art. Helmed by young chocolatier Prateek Bakhtiani since 2019, Ether approaches chocolate with reverence and creativity – it’s about the “art of living” as much as the act of eating, with meticulous attention to ingredients, process, and form. The brand’s design echoes this philosophy: a subtly elegant black-and-gold visual theme and bespoke typography convey a sense of purity, richness, and quiet complexity. In Ether’s atelier (styled more like a minimalist art studio than a typical candy shop), classic French technique meets imaginative flavour, think single-origin cacao paired with Indian mangoes, spices, or other seasonal inspirations in limited-edition collections. By re-contextualizing chocolate as an infinitely versatile artistic medium, Ether offers an emotionally resonant dessert experience where each bonbon or bar feels like a curated piece of edible art.
Ether
Words Harita Odedara
10.06.2025