Four key foods that elude Mrs Khanna at Indian supermarkets

If you think Mrs Smith shopping at a Tesco supermarket in the UK and Mrs Khanna buying groceries at a Mumbai food retailer get to choose from the same categories of products, think again. Fact is, Mrs Smith has access to products that Indian consumers can only dream of buying!

In most Western (and even Eastern) supermarkets and hypermarkets, the food department offers four sections that are missing partially or totally at big food retailers in India. They are: Fruits and Vegetables (F&V), Meat (including dish and delicatessen), Dairy and Bakery.

F&V: Over the past eight years, F&V has seen some national level presence and earned respect as a category, thanks to the big-ticket initiatives of Reliance Fresh. Safal of NDDB, though amazing in its back-end specialisation and farmer connect, missed the trick in creating a magical front-end shopping experience. Its outlets in Delhi and Bangalore lack imagination. Big Bazaar’s big thrust in this area has resulted in company-wide focus on F&V, resulting in expansion of space allocated to the ‘Fresh’ category. The firm shows distinct signs of becoming a major player in F&V, and of offering the consumer a best-in-the-market experience.  Very few companies do F&V well, so are unable to make an impact.

In Canada, leading retailers dedicate as much as 15,000 square feet to F&V alone. Shopping at these stores for ‘fresh’ produce is not only an experience but a delightful discovery. What then deprives the Indian shopper of a similar experience? It’s a combination of a fragmented farming community and a skeptical mindset of retail owners who doubt if fresh produce would be lucrative. This has resulted in F&V remaining under-invested and neglected for years. The last few years, however, have seen the scene change grudgingly. I can only rejoice (and so will Mrs Khanna, too, perhaps).

Meat: Meat-eaters are to be pitied. Why? Although chicken is the most popular meat and a growth story in India, the less said about the way it is sold the better. Poultry growing practices remain very unsupervised. Typically, Mrs Khanna places phone orders for chicken or visits the local butcher. I think it would not be an exaggeration to say that there is not even a single clean and neat chicken shop in India. Well, even if there were a few, it is unlikely retailers would be able to guarantee (or even know what is) food safety in regard to chicken meat. Is the bird antibiotic residue-free at the time of culling? Such a question might elicit empty stares.

In meat markets of India, no retailing standards are practised nor enforced. Perhaps, one key reason is that some of the big retailers belong to certain communities that are vegetarian by choice. Although they sell meat, they don’t seem to put their heart into making the trade world class. Will they change their attitude in future? Or, will they chicken out? Time will tell.

The scene is worse in fish markets. Fish as a product suffers from very suspect supply chain practices. From the waters to the trawler, and then to the wet markets on pavements, the journey could take more than 20 hours. But all that is used to stop putrefaction over this long period of time is a flimsy layer of ice!

The only reason more people are not sick is because we Indians cook everything to death before we eat it. We specialise in destroying not only the bacteria but the product itself, don’t we?

Delicatessen: What’s that?  In India, dairy is equal to milk. Not even ice cream.  Retailers don’t keep more than ten running feet of ice cream sections. The revolution that is waiting to happen in India is yoghurt! Only if some dairy company would work with retailers to set up chillers at stores and bring to the consumers the wonder that can be yoghurt! Retail outlets in major cities don’t sell even liquid milk. This is because most middle and upper households get milk delivered at home every morning for a service fee of less than Rs500 a month. Mrs Smith buys milk by the gallons in cans. But Mrs Khanna gets packet milk at her doorstep. The retailer in India is missing a big deal indeed.
Bakery: India has grown up on dry bread. At least, south India has contributed breakfast foods like idli, dosa, upma, vada and uthappa to India’s culinary tradition. But spare a thought for those who don’t have these for breakfast and have grown up on dry bread. Why is the “double roti” so dry? If the bread is to be tasty, it must have high moisture, to keep it succulent and webbed.

Hundreds of varieties of such tasty bread can be found in bakeries abroad. But, in India, the typical sliced loaf is kept dry so that it can have a five-day shelf-life as the supply chains of modern bread plants need that much time to get the product to the consumer.

The happy trend has been that hypermarkets in India now offer a wide range of breads. But the basic bread which is also tasty still eludes the consumer. Bread offers an enjoyable shopping experience for the consumer and is profitable to the retailer, besides being a great loyalty builder. Yet, this is a highly under-served category.

By the way, these four categoties have the potential to be very profitable for retailers as they do not attract the restrictive ‘maximum retail price’ (MRP). They also provide margin elasticity if the supply chain is managed well. If the food retailer is to thrive in future, he must offer the four categories with passion to the Indian consumer.

So, even as Mrs Smith spends more time shopping whilst also discovering and enjoying, Mrs Khanna is seeing Indian retailers change their store layouts to make them ‘fresh’, lively and, she must hope, meaty in future.

— The writer is a veteran retail professional and a sector expert.
He can be reached at radha.krishnan@alignedbp.com