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| Edited By: Ashish K Tiwari |Source: DNA |Updated: Aug 16, 2017, 07:40 AM IST
The foods division of Pune-based company Desai Brothers currently houses four brands namely Mother’s Recipe, Dabee, Elmac and the recently acquired sauces brand Spread On. Sanjana Desai, head of business development - food ivision, Desai Brothers Ltd, in conversation with Ashish K Tiwari, speaks about the company’s offerings, market share, future plans etc.
It is challenging but also very exciting. Mother’s Recipe is a 14-year old brand now while the others are a lot younger. We are working on strengthening our policies and processes. Once that’s in place, it will then be very easy to manage all the brands and related offerings.
Once the brand architecture is in place and you know what each brand should stand for in the future, then it becomes very easy. Under Mother’s Recipe, we have 62 variants of pickles and it’s all local, regional and authentic taste. We have a Madras Thuku, a Kerala Vadu, cut mango from Karnataka, Punjabi and Bengali pickle. I want to replicate the same strategy of local authentic taste because every region has different taste. You really have to give people the choice of flavours. As long as it is authentic flavour, the thing will be appreciated.
For pickles, we are the market leader in India at about 24%. In ready-to-cook, we don’t have a separate market share because it is clubbed with ready-to-eat and masalas. The papad market is very challenging because it is highly unorganised. Sauces segment is growing at about 9% year-on-year and is definitely a segment we are looking at as well.
We have a manufacturing facility in Kolkata with Elmac. So we have increased capacity five times ever since we have bought it. We do a lot of private label manufacturing for Big Bazar, Spencer, Pizza Hut, Café Coffee Day from there and are working with them to develop more products. We also have a new manufacturing facility in Gujarat where phase-I is done and in a couple of months it should be operational. We have increased capacity in our Pune manufacturing unit, especially for the ready-to-cook and instant mixes category.
I think brand positioning and brand identity needs to be very clear from top down. It needs to be seeped in through the sales people to the ground. We do a lot of below-the-line (BTL) activities to ensure good visibility for our brands and products. Like they say, ‘What is visible, will sell’. I take that very seriously. We are doing a lot of digital and social marketing thereby ensuring we reach the target customers at every possible point.
ATL is on the cards. We will be doing a few campaigns to support the brands. We are doing an interesting co-association for an ATL activity in Kolkata for Elmac now that it’s part of our company.
Everyone has their own favourite pickle/product. So it is not always possible to have all the pickle variants available in every store. We are addressing this issue by going aggressive on e-commerce. We launched our own e-commerce last January and it’s doing great. That apart we are also selling on other platforms like BigBasket.
Online is less than 1% of our overall sales, which is expected for food because it’s just available in your neighbourhood grocery store. This is minuscule at present but I definitely see it growing in the coming years.
It’s 14%. I think it’s needed because our sales revenue is divided in four regions equally, 25% equally. So we need to be strong in each region.
Right now we have sufficient funds to back all our investments for future growth. There is a lot of things that we are working on currently and would be looking to introduce gradually in the market in the future. We want to aggressively get into the convenience space while sticking to traditional Indian food. We also want to get into the health and wellness space, again Indian traditional food.
