Star Bazaar, part of the Tata Group-owned Trent Hypermarket, will focus on food services as the next big business opportunity.
Since it already has a bakery within its premises, it has decided to expand its food offerings and even offer home deliveries through Web sites such as Zomato.com which lists restaurants in a particular city.
The Star Bazaar bakery has steadily extended its services and offers vegetarian and non-vegetarian hot meals, apart from ready-to-eat snacks. Sushmita Paul, Head of Marketing, Star Bazaar said, “In future, we might look at sourcing food from the other Tata companies, but at the moment most of the food is cooked at the store itself. The contribution from bakery operations is 3-4 per cent of the total revenues of the company.”
Chocolates
At the same time, Star Bazaar is also extending the foods category with chocolates being the next private label offering. Treating it as an extension of its bakery services, confectionary will be the new offering under its own brand.
With almost 32 categories under private labels, Star Bazaar’s largest category is staples and home care.
“Almost 10 per cent of our revenues come from private labels and we hope to double it in the next five years,” said Paul.
Even products of its back-end supply chain and infrastructure provider Tesco are getting extended at Star Bazaar’s 15 hypermarkets.
“Today, we sell about 100 products from Tesco but intend taking it up to 500 with new categories like plastics, hangers and toys, apart from its regular food and home products range,” added Paul.
Star Bazaar is also bringing in the Tata connect for its private label products displaying the message ‘A Tata Product’ with the ‘Star’ private label brand below it.
“We are bringing in the Tata brand name on the private label packs to assure customers about the quality of our private label products in spite of the price being 10-15 per cent lower than the regular brands,” added Paul.
purvita@thehindu.co.in