The table at Cilantro, the multi-cuisine restaurant at the Oberoi Trident in Gurgaon, is booked for five people. Five? Sanjeev Chadha, chairman, PepsiCo, India Region, would be accompanied by two corporate communications people. Now, Business Standard would have been delighted to host them at any other time. But the Lunch with BS format is designed to chat with our guests in a relatively informal setting. The guest list is duly pared and Chadha walks in — alone.
As it turns out, the 18-year Pepsi veteran doesn’t need any public relations minders, write
Suvi Dogra and Kanika Datta. Through a two-and-half-hour lunch, he is all charm, cocktail talk and political correctness, effortlessly adept at deflecting controversial issues.
Trident is familiar territory for Chadha, who took charge of Pepsi’s Indian operations after a ten-year stint in Hong Kong.
The hotel was his home away from home for the early months of his new assignment in 2007 when his wife, who runs a consultancy business, stayed back in Hong Kong with their daughter who was finishing school.
As he walks in dressed in smart casuals, the staff queue up to greet him. Their familiarity with our guest is evident: A rival water brand is swiftly and unobtrusively replaced by PepsiCo brand Aquafina.
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Chadha’s profile said he was “partial to good wine”, which suggested that we could legitimately enjoy some choice vintage on Business Standard’s account. Sadly, Chadha chooses a chilled Diet Pepsi, saying he didn’t drink on weekdays or during the day.
Cilantro is known for Delhi’s finest thin-crust pizzas made in a specially-designed wood-fired oven. But Chadha suggests we speak to the chef before placing our orders.
Chatting with Chadha is interesting because he’s one of the few CEOs in India Inc who is not moaning about the slowdown. On the contrary, business couldn’t have been better: His company and competitor Coca-Cola have registered a double-digit growth in the past few quarters. “Both the beverages and foods businesses in India are galloping ahead and we will, in fact, create more jobs directly and indirectly,” he says. Chadha initially took charge as Pepsi’s beverage head and his role was expanded to cover the snacks business this year.
His aim, he says, is to translate PepsiCo’s global head Indra Nooyi’s aim of tripling business in five. “The plans are to expand our product line this year and invest in infrastructure and in making the product available at all points of purchase,” he says.
Naturally, we’re secretly hoping to get a news break on a bottom-of-the pyramid product that Pepsi plans to launch. We know it’s going to be a range of low-priced fortified products to address micro-nutrient deficiencies, because Chadha had said so at a press conference earlier this year.
Casual query: So when was the new beverage going to be launched? Chadha doesn’t slip up. “It could be either a beverage or a snack-food product keeping affordability in mind,” he says, reiterating the press conference information, and goes on to explain how they’re still working on customising the taste.
The chef arrives and suggests an asparagus and champagne soup — there’s no separate thickening, we are told, the vegetable would give the soup “body”. This sounds so exotic that we decide to try it. For the main course Chadha chooses a red snapper and we choose a vegetarian platter and steamed fish respectively.
Chadha was one of the Indian company’s founding executives — he was with advertising agency JWT before that, though he started his career with Brooke Bond in the days before it was subsumed into Hindustan Unilever. He left for his overseas posting way before Pepsi acquired its smart office on the edge of Gurgaon.
Now, he describes what the company is doing to align with PepsiCo’s global aim of achieving a “positive water balance” this year. He says PepsiCo India’s use of 2.2 litres of water for every 2 litres of beverage production is absolutely the global standard. He is, in fact working closely with Confederation of Indian Industry on water issues.
Inevitably, the discussion turns to the controversy over pesticide in Pepsi and Coke’s water and beverages that saw sales drain away quicker than water in a desert. He wasn’t around when the controversies broke but he’s inherited the reverberations. After the 2005 controversy, Nooyi said she’d wished she had flown down to India and spoken to stakeholders (which the media took as a hint that Chadha’s predecessor Rajiv Bakshi’s handling of the issue may have been less than optimum). “Yes, I recall her saying that,” Chadha murmurs and offers no more comment.
What about Sunita Narain, the feisty head of the Centre for Science and Environment, the institution whose research revealed pesticide residues in water and soft drinks? Had he met her? “No,” he replies, “but I’d love to.”
He is, however, quick to reiterate that India’s food laws are weak and did not regulate pesticide content in food and beverage scientifically. “It was unfortunate, since the colas are probably the purest form of beverage one could have, given the rigorous purification process the water underwent. Most of the farm produce we eat has more pesticide.” He doesn’t hesitate to criticise the media’s role in the issue, but far less strongly than most other executives.
Our soup is, to put it mildly, outstanding (though the evidence of champagne is extremely subtle) and we wish we hadn’t been conservative in asking for “two-into-three” portions. We revert to small talk while we savour the soup, and Chadha tells us how much he and family enjoyed the cosmopolitanism of Hong Kong and chats about places he’s been skiing — New Zealand and Aspen, Colorado — which is another of his interests.
Since Pepsi pours money into cricket, we ask him whether he was following the Indian Premier League. Chadha confesses to having lost touch with cricket after moving to Hong Kong, his passion being squash. “I taught my son the game only to regret it some years after as he beat me,” he jokes and then gleefully goes on to describe how his son was beaten by a member of the Yale women’s team in the US.
Our main courses arrive. Chadha’s grilled fish looks overdone, but he says it’s fine. The babaganoush on the platter could have been better but the steamed fish was unexceptionable, bar some difficulty in scooping it out of a wicker basket.
Meanwhile, Chadha agrees to switch drinks — not to wine but a fruit drink prescribed by our server. It arrives in a tall glass, the colour of Rooh Afza with miscellaneous bits of fruit at the bottom. Chadha doesn’t look like he’s enjoying it but, given the waiter’s enthusiasm, he is too diplomatic to complain.
The talk ranges over a wide variety of subjects — from Dehradun and Calcutta where he schooled (his father was with the Survey of India, hence the peripatetic childhood) to the tony Xintiandi district in Shanghai, created by the simple expedient (for China) of acquiring land from villagers.
Pepsi’s bottom-of-the-pyramid initiative has prompted Chadha to get first-hand experience of consumers in the lower socio-economic strata (his Lever training, no doubt, since this is standard operating procedure for execs there). He tells us about a recent visit to a family of five in a chawl in Mumbai, living in a space not much larger than the size of our lunch table and on an income of Rs 3,000 a month.
Like many of us, he’s struck by the indomitable spirit and resourcefulness of Indians who live on the edge, and he speaks with more than usual passion about it. “It is amazing to see the maximum optimisation of resources for a family living on Rs 3,000,” he tells us. All the children have been to school and harbour ambitions to be engineers and doctors. “Everything is shared; if there’s not enough money, they all do without.” These “little people” stories are so rarely told that we suggest he write about it and agrees that he may.
The lunch is winding down and we skip dessert for coffee. Since he loved Hong Kong so much, did he plan to retire there — this is a premature question since he’s got a long way to go. He’s not offended, though, but said home is too many places now. “Bhutan is one place that has been endorsed by my global PepsiCo friends to the extent that one wants to become the country manager there.” That’s not half bad as a retirement plan either.