The Hindu Business Line : CavinKare enters peanut candy market

Chennai, Aug. 23 Expanding its range of products in the foods segment, FMCG company CavinKare Pvt Ltd has launched peanut candy bars under the Chinni’s brand. Called Chinni’s Crunch‘o’, this product comes in two flavours as well — orange and rose — besides the plain one to differentiate itself from the other brands in the market.

Mr Ramesh Viswanathan, Executive Director, CavinKare, told Business Line the company is expected to finish seeding the South markets with the product in the next three months. The national rollout will be completed sometime next ye ar.

CavinKare had test-marketed the candy under a different brand name. The market is very large, and is estimated at Rs 150 crore in Tamil Nadu alone.

There are only a handful of well-known players, Rajaram’s being one of them, but largely, the market is made up of local brands, especially those coming from the unorganised segment, he explained.

Crunch‘o’s challenge, points out Mr Viswanathan, is that it will have to compete not just with other brands of its ilk but with other snacks which could be anything, a fried savoury, a biscuit, a piece of chocolate. Most brands sell at Re 1 or Rs 2 for an equivalent quantity but CavinKare has priced this at Rs 6 for 50 gm. “We’ll have to see how many upgrade to this,” says Mr Viswanathan. The company is sourcing the candy from a supplier. Advertising for this brand will begin only after it has been distributed in at least two States, he added.

CavinKare’s other launch is a hair wash under the Meera brand. Meant for the Kerala market, Meera Champaruthi Thali is a packaged version of the traditional one which uses hibiscus leaves and is made in homes. This is not being positioned as shampoo, but as a traditional product in a convenient form, said Mr Viswanathan.

Shampoo penetration in the Kerala market is only 15 per cent, compared to 40 per cent in India, he pointed out, adding that consumers in Kerala still preferred home-made solutions to clean their hair. CavinKare had done a similar experiment with a soap nuts (reetha) shampoo under the Meera brand in Andhra Pradesh, and that shampoo now accounts for 9 per cent of the Rs 300-crore shampoo market in that State.

Flagship shampoo brand Chik is close to getting a 20 per cent market share in the Rs 1,600-crore shampoo market in the country, and in Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, has over 30 per cent market share in each State.

A couple of variants, cooling and anti-dandruff, have been launched. The latter will see a big push in October-December, the season when such shampoos are in demand, Mr Viswanathan said, adding that the cooling version was doing well in the Northern States.

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