PepsiCo India, which introduced premium brand Doritos in the country recently, is looking to manufacture it in India by next year and leverage on the potential of the corn chip snack format.

Partho Chakrabarti, Vice-President, Snacks Category, said: “The response for Doritos has been encouraging. We plan to start domestic production of Doritos early next year. As of now we are focusing on distributing it largely in the metros and working on an imported model.”

While premium brands Doritos and Cheetos will continue to play a “unique” role in the Indian portfolio of PepsiCo, the company is now sharply focusing on Kurkure and Lay’s to drive growth in the snacks category.

“We are focusing on growing our two master brands – Lay’s and Kurkure, which will stretch across various price points as well as formats in the snacks category,” he said.

Traditional snacks Recently, the company launched 15 new traditional snack products or namkeens such as Chiwda Mix for the West, Punjabi Chatka and South Tangy Twist keeping in mind the various regional palates.

The company hopes to leverage on the pan-India brand equity of Kurkure to strengthen its presence in the traditional snacks segment. The traditional snacks category, which is highly fragmented with strong regional players, is pegged at ₹7,000 crore.

These variants will be available in 150 different packs at various price points starting from as low as ₹2. The company will continue its aggressive play in the traditional snacks segment as it looks to launch 10-12 additional variants by the year-end.

“This is just the beginning of the new Kurkure journey, which is based on consumer feedback and insights. Every State has its unique flavour and we see potential to launch more such products to address the diversity in palates of Indian consumers and give us substantial scale in volumes,” he added. The company believes while some of these variants will work well in regional markets, others have the potential to gain pan-India scale.

Food train trail Talking about rural growth, Chakrabarti said that while last year the FMCG sector saw visible slowdown in rural market, the company is seeing positive signs so far this year.

As part of its strategy to engage with consumer, the company has also embarked on an initiative under which 40 families will get the chance to travel on the branded food train called the Kurkure Family Express. These families will also feature in the new TV campaign for the brand.

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