Bengaluru: Recently, Anupama, a 28-year-old lawyer in Bengaluru, was scrolling through quick commerce (q-commerce) company Swiggy Instamart’s app when a thumbnail of a packet of banana chips caught her eye. The brand, Noice, was priced slightly higher than some of the other options on the screen, including national labels she had grown up with.
“It didn’t look like a typical grocery brand at all. It felt more like something you’d pick up at a boutique food store,” Anupama told Mint. Price was not a factor but the presentation on the screen definitely was. Like a moth to a light, the bright yellow colour drew her in and she tapped on it.
That instinctive and irrational add-to-cart moment is exactly what Swiggy is betting Noice can engineer on a large scale.
When the company rolled out the food and beverage (F&B) brand in the middle of last year, it did not resemble a routine back-end grocery experiment. The packs were hard to miss—splashed in bold colours that stood out on the app’s grid of thumbnails, they quickly caught everyone’s attention.
This was not your typical atta and rice. Under Noice, Instamart has launched a wide range of items, including regional snacks, frozen favourites, protein-rich products, and impulse buys such as lime soda and premium dark chocolate.
Simply put, this is Instamart trying to become a fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) company inside a delivery app.
In a business where margins are thin and competition is intense, Noice could become the company’s most strategic lever to improve unit economics. Or it could end up as a failed bet.
A different playbook
Private labels are not new to quick commerce. Zepto has Relish for meat and seafood, and Daily Good for staples. Blinkit runs Wholefarm while the Tata group-owned BigBasket has BB Royal, BB Popular and Fresho. Swiggy Instamart has Supreme Harvest in staples.
Nearly 40% of BigBasket’s revenue comes from private brands, pushing the platform’s repeat usage to 50%, Mint reported last year.
Early experiments were largely anchored in staples and industry experts say this was by design. Categories such as dal, rice and sugar are commodity purchases with limited brand loyalty. Quality is easier to benchmark and supply chains are easier to control.
Private labels in these categories typically won on price. Across q-commerce and e-commerce, the in-house brand was positioned as a cheaper alternative to national brands listed on the same platform. The thesis was operational efficiency and cost control, not brand building. Even when Blinkit (formerly Grofers) expanded into multiple packaged categories, the core differentiator remained affordability.
Instamart’s Noice, however, appears to have taken a different path. Instead of focusing on staples it spans over 300 stock-keeping units (SKUs), including bread, paneer, pickles, chips, kombucha, regional sweet treats and dosa batter. Instead of affordability, it looks at premium pricing. For instance, a 100gm packet of Noice’s banana chips costs ₹59. In comparison, a 100gm pack of Chheda’s banana chips costs ₹32 and Modern Kitchens’ ₹43.
Industry watchers say this is less a sourcing play and more an attempt to build a consumer-facing FMCG brand within quick commerce. The focus is on discovery, snacking and trend-driven categories with packaging, branding and fast iteration cycles that make it resemble a typical direct-to-consumer (D2C) playbook rather than a grocery margin optimization strategy.
Moreover, the broader strategy, according to a former Swiggy executive who looked at supply partnerships, was to position Noice as a ‘better-for-you’ alternative. That meant avoiding palm oil, limiting heavy mechanization and working with semi-local vendors capable of small-batch production at scale.
In some ways, Noice’s approach mirrors the playbook of Trader Joe’s, the US-based retailer that built a deeply loyal customer base on the back of private labels. Trader Joe’s treats its in-house products as the main event, not as cheaper substitutes, investing in distinctive packaging and a tightly curated assortment that makes discovery central to the shopping experience.
“By controlling sourcing, pricing and storytelling, it builds loyalty to its own labels. Noice appears to be attempting a similar shift in quick commerce, positioning its private label as a destination rather than just a margin lever,” said Ankur Bisen, senior partner at management consultancy firm The Knowledge Company.
Swiggy Instamart did not respond to Mint’s queries.
Packaging wins
For a brand that is discovered first as a small thumbnail on a 6-inch phone screen, packaging is a critical lever to attract attention and drive trials. Noice’s packs lean heavily into bold, bright colours with “Noice” splashed across the front in a large, unmissable font, designed to stand out instantly on a crowded app grid.
“In quick commerce, your first shelf is a phone screen, not a supermarket aisle. Your pack has to stand out as a tiny square, stay readable and still look different from every big legacy brand sitting next to it,” Bisen said.
In categories where price is not the only differentiator, packaging becomes central to recall and repeat purchase, the real driver of private-label success.
There are enough examples in traditional FMCG of packaging making a real dent in consumer mindshare. When Parle Agro moved its flagship mango-based drink Frooti from glass bottles to tetra packs two decades ago, it reshaped how consumers consumed the drink by aligning it with the on-the-go lifestyle.
A thicker laminate, matte finish and bold typography signal quality cues that can justify premium pricing in certain categories.
Data is king
At the heart of Noice’s strategy is something far more granular than traditional FMCG market research. It is consumption data. According to Sreedhar Prasad, former partner at KPMG and a startup advisor, quick commerce platforms are sitting on insights that legacy snack companies simply never had access to.
“I may purchase chicken, milk or toor dal, but there is no intelligence on that. It only tells you frequency and basic patterns,” he said. Staples reveal habits, but not the nuance that snacking shows.
When a makhana-based snack sees traction among South Indian consumers, or a murukku repeatedly goes out of stock in a particular cluster, that signals something deeper. “That knowledge was never easy to get before,” Prasad said. The same applies to jaggery banana chips popular in Kerala or karam gavvalu, an Andhra snack. “Which cluster has a population that orders this frequently? Large FMCG brands have not had hyperlocal consumption knowledge.”
For Instamart’s Noice, this hyperlocal, contextual understanding of snacking behaviour is the edge. That edge has not gone unnoticed by large consumer companies and the dynamics are shifting.
According to Rakesh Raghuvanshi, founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Sekel Tech, a technology company that helps legacy consumer brands improve their digital presence, as FMCG companies make note of the growing popularity of private brands, they are recalibrating their strategy, allocating higher spends towards better visibility on marketplaces, especially quick commerce.
“Quick commerce is no longer an experimental channel for large brands,” Raghuvanshi said. “They are treating it as a primary shelf. That means higher investments in ads, search optimization and sharper pricing because that’s where high-intent consumption is shifting.”
Private labels are driving this strategy shift.
The profitability lever
Noice’s rapid scale-up comes at a time when the quick commerce pecking order is shifting. Eternal-owned Blinkit led the market by value with nearly 47% share, followed by Zepto with 24%, Instamart at 22% and others at 6%, according to calendar year 2025 data from research firm Datum Intelligence.
In the December quarter, Blinkit fulfilled 243.3 million orders while Instamart serviced less than half that number—about 106.4 million orders. Order volume data for Zepto, BigBasket, Flipkart Minutes and Amazon Now is not available.
The adjusted Ebitda loss of Instamart widened to ₹908 crore in the December quarter, from ₹578 crore in the year-ago period, according to the company’s disclosures. Ebitda is short for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.
This indicates how scale alone is no longer a sufficient moat in a market where delivery speeds are converging and discounting is costly. Private labels are emerging as one of the few structural levers left to improve margins and create reasons for repeat usage.
The Knowledge Company’s Bisen believes that as competition intensifies, differentiation will also matter. “Everyone can promise 10-minute delivery. But only a differentiated portfolio will stand out,” he said.
High-frequency snacking categories pull users back onto the app, expand basket sizes and lift revenue per user. Private labels, with their higher margins and tighter supply control, strengthen unit economics.
By formalizing and branding regionally popular but largely unorganized products such as chikki, Mysore pak and chakli, Swiggy Instamart is creating pricing power in categories that previously lacked a clear benchmark.
“While not everything in Noice’s portfolio may be new, many of the products being launched may not have had a strong national brand presence earlier. Further, when you are branding the unbranded, you dictate the price,” said KPMG’s Prasad.
Take something like jaggery-dipped banana chips from Kerala. “If I ask you how much 100gm should cost, you may not have an answer. There is no benchmark from large organized brands,” Prasad added.
The risks
Private labels have always had inherent tension. The platform is both referee and player, hosting brands while competing with them. Quick commerce insiders recall how, in the early days, the balance of power was heavily tilted towards large FMCG companies and they had leverage in negotiations and even pushed back against competing private labels. Now, the platforms have become indispensable, even for large companies.
The power balance may have shifted, but the friction remains. Making private labels visible while also meeting brand monetization commitments is a delicate exercise, according to industry experts, as quick commerce platforms earn significant advertising revenue from external brands that pay for premium placement.
There are operational thumb rules to private labels. Industry observers say private labels work best in categories that are large and where a vendor’s minimum order quantity can realistically be sold within 15 to 21 days. Anything slower raises the risk of expiry, working capital getting locked in inventory, and pressure on already-thin margins.
Small-batch manufacturing, which Noice leans into, reduces industrial-scale risk but increases the chances of stock-outs. Wastage, expiry and out-of-stock situations can quickly erode margins in a fast-delivery model.
Moreover, building an FMCG brand is capital intensive. Staples allow for packaging efficiency. A handful of generic pouches can work across dozens of SKUs—50gm of jeera, mustard or methi can sit in the same standardized pack design.
FMCG snacking does not work that way. Experts note that products such as bhujia, chips or biscuits require distinct pouches, laminates and pack designs. Each category therefore needs separate tooling, packaging development and inventory planning. While the assortment may appear as a colourful grid of products on the app, it is backed by significant upfront investment in design, packaging and supply chain coordination.
But operational complexity is only part of the risk. The experience of Trader Joe’s illustrates the sensitivities that can arise when a retailer builds a powerful private-label portfolio. The American retailer has faced social media and legal backlash after it introduced comparable products already sold by brands. This underlies the structural tension when a company operates as both marketplace and competitor.
There is yet another dimension. The dual role—neutral intermediary and competing seller—attracts scrutiny under Indian law, said Sonam Chandwani, managing partner at KS Legal & Associates, a law firm.
“Under the Consumer Protection (E-commerce) Rules, 2020, platforms must ensure transparency in seller identification, clear disclosures and fair grievance redressal. Beyond that, competition law becomes relevant. If a platform enjoys market power in online food delivery or discovery, any algorithmic self-preferencing, preferential visibility, differential commissions or access to seller data could be examined as abuse of dominance under the Competition Act, 2002,” Chandwani said.
In the event of conflict, an aggrieved brand could approach the Competition Commission of India, seek contractual remedies or initiate civil proceedings, Chandwani noted.
There are challenges aplenty to navigate, but with Noice, Swiggy Instamart is looking to break out from the pack with its F&B private label, taking the premium path rather than rubbing shoulders with the rabble in the affordable aisles on its app. It may well succeed and spur others to do likewise. Or it could fall flat.