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Four years after relaunching its snacks portfolio, Parle Products, the maker of the Parle range of wafers and namkeens and the Full Toss range of snacks, is looking to double turnover of the division by 2018, the company's general manager, marketing, Pravin Kulkarni, said.
Currently, Parle derives around Rs 450-500 crore in topline from its snacks division, which it is looking to take to Rs 1,000 crore in four years, Kulkarni said. "We've been growing at a fairly fast pace in the last few years. We see this growth rate picking up even further given the sales traction we are now seeing in Indian snacks (namkeens)," Kulkarni said.
Parle stepped into the western snacks (chips) space in 2008 with Musst Chips and Musst Stix besides a Monaco range of wafers. By 2011, the company was forced to relaunch Musst Chips and Musst Stix as Parle Wafers and Parle Full Toss respectively owing to poor response from consumers. The Monaco wafer range, on the other hand, was discontinued, to avoid a negative rub-off on the core Monaco biscuit brand, which remains a key product for the company. The Monaco range of chips was billed as an extension of the Monaco biscuit, which has a salty flavour.
Kulkarni says that the snacks division has now stabilised after its initial years of struggle and products such as Parle's Wafers today command a 6% market share in a segment dominated by PepsiCo's Lays. While Full Toss's market share was not disclosed by Kulkarni, the namkeen range promoted by the firm, now has a share of about 4% in two years since launch, he said.
Parle's Full Toss competes with PepsiCo's Kurkure in extruded snacks, while in namkeems, it has rivals such as Haldiram's, Bikaji and Bikano among others. Kulkarni says that Parle's hopes of clocking a higher growth rate in namkeens are on account of the largely regional players that dominate the segment, besides a growing preference for these products by consumers during tea time. "We will be launching more variants under namkeens in a bid to beef up our portfolio," Kulkarni said.
While the western snacks market comprising chips/wafers is pegged at around Rs 4,000-Rs 5,000 crore in size, the Indian snacks market is around Rs 3,500 crore in size. The latter, however, is growing faster than the western snacks market, experts say, on account of the variety that is available in the segment.
