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R. Ravikumar

Chennai, July 18 Naturo Food & Fruit Products Pvt Ltd, a company from the promoters of the erstwhile Nutrine Confectionery, is all set to expand its product range.

It currently has fruit bars (mango, apple and pineapple) in two variants — artificially sweetened and natural; and jackfruit chips.

According to Mr K. Sivamohan Reddy, Director of the company, it will introduce new fruit bars based on guava, grape, papaya and orange. And in the health snack category, it will roll out more fruit (including guava and papaya) and vegetable-based chips. It will also launch a new category candied fruits.

Naturo Food has, in the last one year, invested over Rs 12 crore in setting up a new production line for health snacks and expanding its fruit bar capacity. It currently produces 50 tonnes of fruit bars. Of this, it exports 10 tonnes under the Naturo brand to a few store chains including Asda in the UK, Woolworths in Australia and a few other brands in West Asia.

With new capacity expansion going on stream, it can produce 150 tonnes of fruit bars. “Of this, we plan to export 30 tonnes to various countries under our brand name and also will supply to a few foreign brands,” said Mr Reddy.

After selling the confectionery unit to Godrej a few years ago, the company had to start from scratch in setting up distribution network. “We currently have 1,000 stockists across the country. While we are well entrenched in the South and North, we are working on improving our network in the Western and Eastern markets,” he said. By the end of this year, Naturo Food expects to have at least 1,800 stockists and reach 2 lakh outlets from the current 1.25 lakh outlets.

The company has its production facility at Hoskote near Bangalore. In future “we may explore one more facility either in Hyderabad or somewhere in Maharashtra,” Mr Reddy said. The company’s present turnover is Rs 12 crore and it is working towards taking it to Rs 30 crore for the fiscal 2008-09.

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