Cargill (food business) India is consolidating its portfolio by venturing into ready-to-cook wheat products and fortifying its presence in the oil category. Deoki Muchhal, the company’s MD, talks to Shinmin Bali about busting myths, battling price barriers, local players, and more. Edited excerpts.

What marketing and distribution strategies are you employing for your recently launched premium oil offering, NatureFresh Acti Heart?

Oil is not the kind of product that is needed by only a certain class of consumers; it is a basic need. An obvious issue is the awareness at the consumer level. The objective is to make the product available wherever there is a health need. The first step is to make sure that the product is available to those customers who are already aware and the second is to ensure that we spread awareness consciously to a larger mass to make the product a part of their daily lives.

During Diwali, we came up with the Goodness Wali Diwali proposition for NatureFresh Acti Heart on digital. This was more for consumer awareness. We have also done a lot of work around training our resources, be it distributors or retailers, on how to handle and sell such a product.

How are you tackling the awareness problem for Leonardo Olive Oil?

Leonardo is a premium olive oil brand with a market share of 20.6%. We expect to lead by 2021 with a 35% market share. We are focussed on ensuring that olive oil is suitable for Indian cooking. There is a myth that olive oil is useful only for baby massages. When we bought Leonardo four years ago, we made a conscious effort of explaining the product attributes to consumers. While one variety is suitable for deep frying, another is suitable for shallow frying. In European markets, for instance, olive oil is largely used in salad dressings/toppings or shallow frying. But in the Indian market, consumers were using olive oil meant for light frying/salad toppings, for daily cooking. That led to either distorted taste orthe profile of the fat getting completely masked under other flavours.

We have customised certain formulations that help in deep frying foods without altering taste and flavours. On the packaging front, we have colour-coded and captioned the variants to help people easily identify the oils with respect to their uses.

Is price still a barrier for olive oils?
In our country, price remains a barrier for trials. Barriers for adoption have dramatically come down. But more trials need to happen for consumers to have clarity on the product. We have been largely successful in this.

Cost escalations have happened. There have been duty increases as most of the olive oil is imported from Italy. Habitual consumers continue to buy, but the new recruits are feeling challenged. We are trying to do some re-engineering in the logistical supply chain to optimise certain costs. While there is a natural upsurge in olive oil consumption, it would have been higher if not for the price disparity.
How have you tackled competition from local/unorganised players in the flour and oil categories?
When consumers switch from loose to branded packs, they start reading the information on it. Urban consumers, especially, are very finicky when it comes to food safety. How we process and pack our offerings and maintain the quality is not something that can be replicated by the unorganised entities. The moment the transparency of information comes into the picture, it will become a level playing field with everybody having to declare exactly what goes into the product. For oils and fats, this trend is category changing. Wheat flour will follow the same pattern but will take time as 90% of it is still sold in loose form.

What is the strategy behind venturing into ready-to-cook wheat derivatives?
Globally, we are present in the carbohydrates, fats and proteins space. In India, we have been in the fats space for a long time and have refined the portfolio in the last few months. Here , we are looking to grow in the carbohydrates space and breakfast is where wheat happens to be the staple ingredient in North and Northwestern India. It is important that we provide products that help homemakers create food with ease without compromising on the health quotient. Depending on the maturity of the market, we will keep conducting research on the kind of products that can work in India and customise them for the Indian market.