Zydus bets big on low calorie soft drink

Zydus Cadila Healthcare Ltd is betting big with its low calorie diet soft drink, D'lite. The company has launched two more flavours of the drink. Now D'lite is offered in five different flavours.

"About 40-50 per cent of the sales of D'lite have come from health conscious customers, who are not diabetics. That is exactly where we have positioned the product. It is for health conscious people and is altogether a new segment in India," said Anand Deo, vice-president, consumer division of Zydus Cadila Healthcare.

He, however, did not reveal the sales figures or the target set for D'lite.

While diet softdrinks have been extremely popular in western countries, it is yet to get the popular recognition in India.

D'lite has been launched across 50 cities across the country. "But since this is still an extremely urban concept, about 80 per cent of our D'lite sales have been from the top seven or eight cities of the country," said Jyoti Shiralee, general manager, marketing, of the consumer division of the company.

Besides the lemon, orange and mango flavours that were launched earlier, the company has just launched the jaljeera and passion fruit flavours. "In fact, the jaljeera flavour has been accepted very well, while the passion fruit has an upmarket flavour," said Anand Deo.

"We did face seasonality problem with the product in the initial stages, but they have been sorted out. As of today, the orange and lemon flavours account for the bulk of the D'lite sales with north and west India being the major markets," Shiralee said.