Wipro Consumer Care and Lighting, the maker of Santoor and Chandrika soaps, has announced the acquisition of Kerala-based packaged food and spices brand ‘Nirapara’. This marks the company’s first move in the packaged foods space after it announced its foray into the segment in July earlier this year.
Wipro Consumer Care CEO Vineet Agrawal told CNBC-TV18 in an interview in August that the company will be looking at spices and traditional Indian snacks in its first phase.
The acquisition of Nirapara, launched in 1976, will give Wipro Consumer a portfolio of blended spices and ready-to-cook products. Wipro Consumer is now working on upgrading Nirapara’s product line with better manufacturing processes and expects to bring the products to the market in the next six weeks.
“Nirapara is our Thirteenth acquisition and gives us a clear foothold in the spices and ready-to-cook segment. We are excited to enter a large segment which is expected to grow rapidly,” Vineet Agrawal said.
Nirapara’s portfolio consists of a variety of spice mixes, and rice powder used to make Appam, Idiyappam, Puttu, Dosa, Idli, and more. Sixty-three percent of Nirapara’s business comes from Kerala, eight percent from the rest of India and 29 percent from international markets, largely GCC countries. Wipro Consumer plans to consolidate the brand’s presence in these markets and has no immediate plans to take Nirapara outside its current geographies.
This would mean that the company may look at more brands within spices and the ready-to-cook space for North India and other markets and is open to having more than one to 23 brands for the same category of products. This is likely to be through more such acquisitions, the management said.
“We recognise that spices are core to Indian cooking and the mix changes from region to region with strong regional preferences. There is a huge opportunity in this space for shifting consumers from an unorganised to an organised market by offering authentic, pure and trusted spice mixes. We thus want to cater to the dynamic needs and provide an authentic selection that suits the varied Indian taste, packed under extremely hygienic conditions,” Anil Chugh, President, Food Business, Wipro Consumer Care and Lighting said.
After a foray into spices and ready-to-cook products, Wipro Consumer’s next area of focus will be to enter into the traditional snacks space with a focus on the South Indian market. This too, it said, will be through a combination of organic and acquisition of regional players.
