"Consumers want proof of efficacy"

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: the Chyawanprash fold.

That said, kids mostly find the sharp taste of Chyawanprash not very palatable. So, we have expanded the range with the introduction of Dabur Chyawan Junior, which offers similar benefit of immunity but in a tasty chocolate-flavoured granular form. This helps address the taste barrier among kids.

Chyawan Junior contains more than 35 active Ayurvedic herbs; it has ingredients such as amla, which is rich in vitamin C and antioxidants, energy providing draksha and malt and pippali, which is known to provide resistance against everyday ailments. Dabur, with its Ayurveda expertise, has been able to combine the power of herbs in a format and taste that children love. This will bring about radical changes in the way the MFD category operates.

How do you think this launch will help the mother brand? Is there a fear of cannibalisation? The market has many players, big and small in any case...

The launch will expand the market for Chyawanprash by brining a whole new set of consumers into the fold. This, as I mentioned earlier, is part of Dabur’s efforts to offer the benefits of Chyawanprash to a wider audience. There would not be any cannibalisation with the mother brand. Also, since Dabur Chyawan Junior is a malted food drink, it will compete with the existing health drinks in the market and not with Chyawanprash.

The malted food drinks category is more than five times the size of the Chyawanprash category and hence the recruitment of consumers through Dabur Chyawan Junior would be almost entirely incremental for Dabur.

You have done extensive test-marketing of Dabur Chyawan Junior in key states such as Maharashtra and West Bengal last year. What were the most important findings of this exercise? Did you tweak your product based on these findings?

The test market revealed that the modern day consumers demand more from their energy drinks than just taste and modification through flavours. With its deep-rooted understanding of herbs and Ayurveda, Dabur is well-poised to meet this unmet demand with Chyawan Junior. The results of the test marketing exercise were highly encouraging, which led us to introduce the product nationally within a year of the test launch. No changes have been made to the product.

In the past one year, the company has also introduced Chyawan Prakash, a sugar free variant of Chyawanprash. What is the need for the sudden aggression in this market?