Nissin Foods to serve up Future Group’s tasty treats at kiranas

MUMBAI: Future Group, the pioneer of organised retailing in India, has found the right ingredients in the inventor of Asian snack-food staples to serve up a tasty treat beyond its bailiwick – at street-corner groceries across the country.

Future Consumer (FCL) that sells its own brands of snacks, cookies and other packaged foods at its Big Bazaar and Easy Day stores, will harness the distribution muscle of the Indian unit of Japan’s Nissin Foods to reach out to buyers beyond the 800-odd own outlets that currently stock FCL products. The arrangement is a novelty in India, where about two decades of organised retailing have failed to erode the dominance of neighbourhood grocers in the $600-billion-a-year market.

The Indo-Nissin distribution tie-up, therefore, dovetails into Future Group founder Kishore Biyani's wider strategy to generate Rs 20,000 crore in sales from in-house brands by 2021 and establish itself as a standalone consumer-goods company by enhancing the brand recall of its private labels. The latest initiative will turn the Future Group into a direct rival of HUL, ITC, and Nestle, marquee consumergoods companies whose products dominate the retail shelves at Biyani’s stores.

"We are taking our products and brands to local general trade which accounts for nearly three-fourth of the overall FMCG sales. The scale of our reach will now match the large portfolio that we have created over the last decade," said Devendra Chawla, CEOat FCL. The consumer company has 27 brands under 65 categories, including food brands such as Sunkist, Karmiq, Golden Harvest, Fresh & Pure, Premium Harvest and Tasty Treat.