Bunge India set to revive palm oil brand Lotus

Bunge India is resurrecting the Lotus brand of palm oil, 10 years after acquiring it along with the more popular Dalda, from Hindustan Unilever.

Lotus is now being soft-launched for selling packaged palm oil in the Indian market for institutional clients in select regions and also as a retail brand for the southern market, Dinesh Agarwal, business head for Dalda, said.

“We have plans to get into palm oil under Lotus. We would sell mostly to institutions and in some southern Indian markets we would sell to households,” Agarwal said. While Bunge India’s current brands like Dalda, Amrit, Ginni and Gagan in a range of vanaspati, soyabean, mustard and groundnut oils cater to the retail consumer market, Lotus would be targeting the hitherto untapped market for palm oil, a relatively cheap cooking medium mostly used by eateries and restaurants in India, he said. Consumption of palm oil, in fact, is highest among all edible oils in the country followed by soya bean and mustard oil.

“We have just started production at Kandla and supplying to the northern markets, mostly to the business-to-business segment in bulk packaging.”

Bunge in India is now focusing on expanding the range of edible oils under its flagship Dalda brand with an aim to cover almost all cooking mediums used in every part of the country by March.
“We are now launching soya bean, mustard, groundnut and sunflower oil constituting 85% of country’s consumption basket. And by March we would be getting into the rest 15%, which includes oils from rice bran, sesame, coconut, olive and also cotton seed,” Agarwal said.

Bunge need to expand its portfolio as vanaspati is now suffering average yearly de-growth of about 4%.