Adani Wilmar forays into ready-to-cook food category

With its eyes on the packaged “ready-to-cook” food category, edible oil and commodity player, Adani Wilmar Ltd (AWL) announced its foray into the category with the launch of popular Indian meal — Khichdi under its brand Fortune.

A popular food in a larger part of the country including Punjab, Delhi, West Bengal, Gujarat and South India, ready-to-cook Khichdi is believed to give AWL a first-mover’s advantage with no national player present in the category.

Fortune Khichdi

The company has soft-launched Fortune Khichdi in three variants — Gujarati khichdi, Punjabi khichdi and Bengali khichuri, initially available in Delhi and on e-commerce platforms. It plans to make it available at retail outlets pan India over the next six months. Depending on the market response, AWL will infuse capital in building capacities and launch new products to expand portfolio.

Speaking to

BusinessLine , Ajay Motwani, Head Marketing, AWL, said, “We are waiting how the market responds to this product. Based on the response we will invest for creating space, setting up FFS (form-fill-seal) machines, roasters and other processing infrastructure etc. To begin with, we foresee setting up three such centres with one each in North, East and West in India closer to the market. We may need to invest anywhere between ₹5 crore and ₹10 crore for building these capacities. A decision on this will be taken after first six months.”

On successful roll-out, it expects to reach monthly volume of about 300 tonnes and an annual turnover of about ₹50 crore in a year or two.

“This product contains local-variety of rice in the respective region, and some nutritious foods like ragi, flax-seed, sesame, jowar and bajra and the readymix tastemaker. Each pack caters to four people and are priced competitively,” he added.

Ready-to-cook market

By foraying into the ready-to-cook market, AWL looks to further strengthen its consumer reach. It currently gets about 50 per cent or around ₹12,000 crore from its packaged consumer business — mainly Fortune edible oils and atta. The overall ready-to-cook category in India also includes instant noodles, soup, pasta etc and has an annual CAGR of 15-20 per cent.

AWL will also look at exporting the products in its prominent export markets such as Dubai and Iran.

“The rising number of working women, hostel students and individuals, this gives a convenient option to make a quick nutritious meal,” added Motwani.