Diwali special: How kaju katli beat chocolates in India's supermarket

Diwali is here and so is the time for mithainomics – the art of buying the precise amount of mithais for guests and for gifting so that you are not left with too much or too less of sweets for the festivities. Such painstaking calculations do not take place only in the households but are also done by sellers and manufacturers from long before and behind the scenes. How the packaging is done, how long the shelf-life is, how widely loved the mithai you are buying is, are all part of the factors that consumers consider before buying that lovely package of kaju katli or soan papdi.

Explaining the same at length, Damodar Mall, CEO of Reliance Grocery Retail told Shantanu Deshpande, CEO and co-founder of Bombay Shaving Company in ‘The Barbershop with Shantanu’ podcast that kaju katlis have overtaken sales of chocolates in Indian supermarkets.

“We used to sell a lot of gift packs of chocolates…they do sell even today during any festival season. I said this mega brand was using ‘kuch meetha ho jaye’ as a marketing idea, so why don’t we sell meetha, which people actually consume. Chocolate is consumed by some people in the house…but you take a besan laddu and from grandmother to grandkids, everyone is having it,” said Mall.

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He said that they tried to understand why people were gifting chocolates and not mithais like kaju katli. “And the insight was that because I buy it from a no-name place, he (the seller) gives it to me in a no-name packaging. And by the time I take and gift it to somebody, the ghee is leaking slightly, the pack has become moist on the side and it does not look gift-worthy,” said Mall, adding that then they thought of helping small entrepreneurs scale up and upgrade their packaging and presentation.

“It started working also…we started working with people who made mithai in Bikaner, and told them that we will take you to Chennai and Coimbatore and sell. They said, ‘we have been selling in Rajasthan for 100 years’, so we told them to make it for us for Diwali. What we realised…and the Haldiram’s people told us that sweets are also regional. What desi Chinese is to cuisines – the only cuisine that is pan-India – the soan papdi is to mithai. It is the safest to make, highest shelf-life and not detested by anyone. So, we began with that. And it simply took off,” said Mall.

However, he added, that after one season they realised they can’t do this alone and started looking out for big players everywhere. Eventually they started working with these players in every region.

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“The first shelf-stable kaju katli which could be sold in the ambient was created for us by Bikano. Once Bikano created it, the entire industry just went after it. And today in Diwali, we will sell more kaju katlis than we will sell chocolates. And kaju katli mithai is my No 5 batsman. There are four that sell more than kaju katli – the top is soan papdi, then gulab jamun, then rasgulla, then besan laddu and then kaju katli,” said Mall.

The Reliance Grocery Retail CEO said that smaller brands backed by store brands such as Smart Bazaar can look into the eye of other huge brands and compete. “If a consumer sees a brand kept at our store they will think if Smart Bazaar has backed it, it must be good. A customer might never have bought Gwalia mithai from Gujarat, but if she sees it in our store, she might pick it up. And after that it is between the brand and the consumer etc. But getting the customer in the mood to try and enabling that trial without hesitation is my contribution to building any brand or category,” he added.

Mall said that after the success of mithai sales, bigwigs such as Amul, ITC and Aashirvaad are doing mithai for them. Gajar halwa, badam halwa and dal ka sira from Aashirvaad will be available at all their stores.

“It is a stack-up. You work with startups, build an idea and some of them become very big. You need mega brands for a robust play to happen,” said Mall.

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