Why buy when the same can be cooked at home, new mantra of Indian consumers

While consumes are cutting down on eating pizza and burgers at stores like Domino’s, Pizza Hut or McDonald’s, they are cooking similar western foods at home.

While same store sales of western style foods have slowed down to less than 5 per cent over the past two years, companies which supply and sell western condiments such as speciality sauces, mayonnaise, dips, olive oils and other similar cooking aids are witnessing retail sales growth of anywhere between 25 per cent and 60 per cent over the past 12 months depending on the category, industry players said, quoting data from researcher Nielsen and internal industry estimates.

This indicates that while consumes are cutting down on eating pizza and burgers at stores like Domino's, Pizza Hut or McDonald's, they are cooking similar western foods at home. On the other hand, two industry officials said growth in sales to leading global quick service restaurant (QSR) brands have been growing at barely 3-4 per cent.

"Western condiments and cooking aids gained popularity because of QSRs and out-of-home consumption. It's this familiarity which has led to increase of in-homeconsumption of our products and triggered growth in usage at home," Yogesh Bellani, chief executive of FieldFresh Foods, a joint venture between Bharti Enterprises and Del Monte Pacific said.

Bellani said retail sales of Del Monte's base mayonnaise grew the fastest over the past 12 months — posting 65 per cent volume growth, while its ketchup grew 25 per cent. Quoting Nielsen, Del Monte said it was now the No. 3 brand in ketchup after HUL's Kissan and Nestle's Maggi. Its olive oil, meanwhile, grew 12.5 per cent up from 9 per cent the previous year.



To leverage the increasing in-home popularity of such products, this summer Del Monte rolled out eight new variants of mayonnaise, for which it is running high-decibel campaigns stressing on multiple uses of the mayonnaise as spread and dips.

Cremica Food, which sells sauces, mayonnaise, chutneys and dessert toppings among other condiments, is rolling out a series of new products tailored for the retail sector including vegetarian mayonnaise, dips and speciality sauces.

"Retail sales of our condiments has been growing 40 per cent over the last one year," Cremica Food Industries chairman Akshay Bector said. He attributed the improved sales to innovation and consumers taking to cooking western style foods athome.

Another small but rapidly emerging category which is resonating similar trends is olive oil. "The retail is growing faster for olive oils; the Horeca hotels , restaurants and catering) space is not happening so much," olive oils maker Borges MD Rajneesh Bhasin said.

He said Borges, with 35 per cent market share of olive oils, is spending 10 per cent of its turnover on advertising across cinema, television channels, cab branding and is in talks with a few airlines for inflight branding, to leverage the trend. Borges has now rolled out 100-ml PET packs of olive oil for the retail segment, which it is distributing in small towns, which Bhasin said, was getting 'very encouraging' feedback.

Some players said while out-ofhome consumption was also growing to an extent, the space has been getting too fragmented - which has led to sales being spilt between a large number of players. "The plethora of choices is tremendous - from Indian and western QSRs, to fine-dine restaurants to takeaways to neighbourhood delivery stores," Del Monte's Bellani said.

QSR category leader Jubilant FoodWorks posted its slowest same store sales growth (SSG) — 3.2 per cent year-on-year drop — across seven quarters in the April-June '16 period.

Source: ET Retail.com dated 2016-09-14.