Know how giant is the Namkeen Market of Indore: 500 factories, 4000 retail outlet, Tonnes of production.

The very air is redolent with spices — the piquancy of chilies, the earthiness of coriander, the feisty notes of mint. This is where Indore’s oldest snackwallah, the 81-year-old Aakash Namkeen, fries and roasts about 40 tonnes of savory snacks every day and fills them into 100,000 packets of varying sizes. Its plant at Kumedi village, about 12 km from the heart of Indore, has a production capacity of 1,250 tonnes a month.

Akaash Namkeen

Aakash namkeen indore talk

Rajnish Gupta, director, Aakash Namkeen, says their 65 products — a medley of sev, mixtures, chiwdaand chips — capture the taste of Indore. Even so, this is just a whiff of the namkeen city. Rajnish says around 2.5 lakh tonnes of namkeen is produced every day in the unorganized snack market of Indore.

The city has a centuries-old tradition of food. More than its historical landmarks, it is known for the Ratlami sev, garadu chat and poha that incongruously comes with jalebi. The city’s Sarafa Bazaar, a market lined with jewelry shops, transforms into a vast shack of snacks after sunset and remains vibrant until the early hours of the morning.

om namkeen indore talk
Aakash Namkeen claims to have a retail presence in over 2 lakh outlets across Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Odisha and pockets of Punjab and Haryana. The company, with a revenue of Rs 150 crore and year-on-year growth rate of 30%, occupies shelf space across 100 outlets of 10 modern retail chains, and exports one-ninth of its inventory to cities like Melbourne and San Francisco.

Prakash Namkeen

Prakash Namkeen Indore Talk

Indore’s oldest namkeen giant didn’t start off as Aakash though. When Rajnish’s great-grandfather Hari Lal Gupta launched the company in 1936, he had named it Prakash Namkeen after his youngest son. Hari Lal was one of the first businessmen to leverage the city’s fondness for snacks to establish a one-stop shop for all kinds of namkeen in Indore. Much has changed since then. In 1992, the family business split into two entities. Rajnish’s father Ramesh Das Gupta renamed their unit Aakash Namkeen while his uncle Raj Kumar Gupta retained the original name. “Today, Indore has at least 500 factories and 4,000 retail outlets producing and selling namkeen,” says Anurag Bothra, proprietor, Om Namkeen.

Prataap Snacks

prataap-snacks indore talk

 

Aakash, Prakash, Om and 10 other big and small snack companies have revealed in being the snack satraps of Indore. Yet, only one of them has been able to make it big: Prataap Snacks. According to the latest report by Nielsen, which puts Haldiram Foods, PepsiCo and Balaji Wafers as the three biggest snack players by sales in India, Indore’s Prataap Snacks has burst into the No. 5 slot.
A relatively newer company founded by Amit Kumat, Apurva Kumat and Arvind Mehta in 2003, Prataap Snacks got Rs 265 crore worth of VC funding from Sequoia India over multiple investment rounds, with the first tranche coming in 2011. It eventually filed for an IPO in September 2017. The company, which sells namkeen, chips and extruded snacks, under the Salman Khan-endorsed brand name Yellow Diamond clocked Rs 1,058 crore in sales in 2017 and had a successful IPO that was subscribed 47.29 times on the final day.

Om Namkeen

om namkeen indore talk 2

Players like Om are happy being a big fish in a small pond. They munch on anecdotes. Its most popular namkeen is Income Tax Mixture after a 17-year-old incident in which a few income-tax professionals asked for a blend of five-six mixtures during a visit to the shop. Anurga Bothra’s father Dhanpat sold leftovers of this mixed mixture to customers and it became an instant hit. Anurag has recently launched a mixture of 50 varieties and called it the GST Mixture owing to its “complicated” taste. He now has eight standalone retail outlets of Om Namkeen — five in Indore and three in Kolkata — where he offers 350 varieties of farsan (salty snacks). He is willing to invest in product innovation and multiply the already large offerings but wants to focus on serving the customers of Indore better as opposed to expanding into other cities.

Source: Economictimes
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