BackHealthy snack sales fail to sizzle in India
Healthy snack sales fail to sizzle in India
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Mumbai: Healthy snacks, part of the health and wellness food market, are yet to find favour with Indian consumers despite attempts by PepsiCo India Holdings Pvt Ltd, Parle Products Pvt Ltd and Marico Ltd to tempt them with offerings such as Aliva, Monaco Smart Chips and Saffola Zest since 2009.
“Though we have embarked on a journey to add health to taste, it’s going to be a discovery of what works with consumers and a few brands may fail before this category develops significant volumes," said Devendra Chawla, president, food and fast moving consumer goods business, Future Group.
The group is the parent of India’s largest modern retail chain by revenue, Pantaloons Retail (India) Ltd, which runs the Big Bazaar and Food Bazaar stores.
The health and wellness food sector, which includes health drinks and sugar-free food among other things, posted sales of ₹ 5,000 crore in 2010 and is estimated to grow 3.5-4 times by 2015, according to the Tata Strategic Management Group (TSM), a Mumbai-based consulting firm.
But the healthy snacks category hasn’t yet been able to capitalize on this demand.
The Indian snack market largely consists of Gujarati snacks like farsan and wafers that are typically fried. With healthy snacks, consumer goods companies attempted to offer consumers a “healthier non-fried option".
However, “healthy snack is a misnomer. In India, anything packaged including bread is considered unhealthy. It is a difficult category to build," said Tejaswani Adhikari, chief insights officer, Future Group.
The new items haven’t been able to replace traditional healthy Indian snacks such as puffed rice and chana jor (a crunchy black gram snack).
“Health conscious people don’t consider either biscuits or chips to be healthy as they have high sodium content," said Suman Agarwal, a nutritionist who runs the Selfcare Clinic in Mumbai and is the co-author of The Don’t Diet Diet Cookbook.
Products such as Aliva are creating a new sub-category in the snacks market as they are positioned between chips and biscuits. But “category creation requires time and persistence. There is a learning curve," said Pankaj Gupta, practice head, consumer and retail, TSM.
Pack sizes for instances are small—12-15 grams—priced at say, ₹ 15 each.
“As consumers here eat in smaller quantities (compared with advanced countries) they are sure of what they want to eat—when they feel like having chips they go for chips and when they feel like having biscuits they eat biscuits," said Mayank Shah, group product manager, Parle Products.
The maker of Parle-G, Krack Jack and Monaco biscuits, the company withdrew Monaco Smart Chips as it was catering only to a niche, making it “commercially unviable", according to Shah.
Despite the tepid response, marketers are not giving up. PepsiCo will continue to push its product. “Aliva is targeted at the upper end consumers who are looking for healthier options," a company spokesperson said. “The brand is doing well as per our expectations and we are also developing an aggressive innovation pipeline to offer consumers healthier choices. Aliva is part of our journey to build a healthier portfolio and we will continue to invest in the brand."
Britannia Industries Ltd widened its portfolio of such snacks in December 2011, with NutriChoice Multigrain Thins, a baked snack in three flavours.
“Unlike the existing product which just takes away the bad— “fried"—and substitutes (it) with “baked", we are doing value addition and giving the consumer more with multi-grain," said Anuradha Narasimhan, category director, health and wellness, Britannia. It was too early to comment on the success of the new line, but the company’s multi-grain biscuits’ category is doing well, she said.
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