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In a bid to bust myths and counter fake news regarding nutrition, Nestle India plans to launch a chat-bot enabled consumer website called Ask Nestle this year.
The company also said that it will continue to be aggressive in adding new products, as it is currently working on nearly 2-3 dozen innovations across categories.
Suresh Narayanan, Chairman and Managing Director, Nestlé India, said: “In the next couple of weeks, we will launch a personalised chatbot-enabled website on nutrition. Ask Nestle will fundamentally seek to be a reliable, trustworthy and a scientifically-anchored platform for nutrition and lifestyle information for consumers.”
Interactive platform
The digital platform which will be launched in collaboration with Google, will offer over 600 meal plans to consumers besides tools to enable consumers to make healthier choices.
He said that this will be an information dissemination and interactive platform for consumers and the company won’t use it for product promotion.
The company could, though, look at linking it with its e-commerce platform at a later stage.
“Nestle spends nearly $2 billion annually across its R&D facilities around the globe and we do a lot of work in the nutrition and wellness space and we want to share this with consumers,” he said adding that there is an enormous amount of fake news and misinformation in the nutrition space which is misleading for consumers.
Nestle India, which crossed the ₹11,000 crore-mark in turnover in 2018, said that substantative part of the overall growth last year came from strong volume growth.
“In fact in 2018, we saw sustained-volume led growth across all the categories in the portfolio. All the core brands have performed well. India has been a growth story for Nestle and aggressive growth continues to be on our agenda,” Naryanan said.
Innovations galore
The company has also launched as many as 40 new products over the past three years. Asked whether the company will continue with this strategy, he said, “Innovation will continue to be strong play in Nestle India as supporting new categories and new innovations will be at the centre of whatever we do.”
“At least 2-3 dozen projects are on the anvil. While we will continue adding new innovations, we will also look at consolidation of our existing portfolio,” he added.
The company, for instance, will soon put karela raita and mishti doi variants on the shelves.
Nestle India has also stepped up its advertising and marketing spends to back new launches.
Analysts believe that the company, which was historically known for low ad spends, is now on track to up its advertisement spends on a sustainable basis.
Expansion plans
Narayanan said: “Nestle India sees opportunities to grow exports in countries in South Asian and South-East Asian regions.”
Replying to a query on plans to expand manufacturing capacity, he said, “Given the overall buoyancy in the company across categories, expansion of manufacturing capacity is under active consideration.”
The Swiss major can do this either by increasing capacity at its existing manufacturing facilities or by setting up a greenfield facility in the future.
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