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Yoghurt market on brisk churn

Nithya Subramanian

Ratna Bhushan

NEW DELHI, Dec. 24

THE yoghurt and flavoured curd market is churning with activity, with big multinational names showing interest in the category. The buzz doing the rounds is that the Swiss foods major, Nestle India, is set to roll out flavoured yoghurt in the market shor tly.

`Milkfood' yoghurt, an HLL brand now, is also seeing a revival of sorts. In the recent months, the brand has made a re-appearance on shop shelves at least in the Delhi market.

While repeated attempts by Business Line to get a confirmation from Nestle did not yield any result, a Hindustan Lever spokesperson said, ``We have now begun marketing Milkfood flavoured yoghurt, a brand we acquired in 1995.''

Milkfood was among the pioneers of the category in the early 1990s, with strawberry being one of the popular flavours. Though the brand did gain visibility, Milkfood yoghurt subsequently disappeared from the shelves. Industry sources attribute the brand' s failure to the market being in a nascent stage and the infrastructure being inadequate at that point of time.

Analysts claim that HLL has shown renewed interest in the category, because it has a cold chain infrastructure in place apart from having also acquired the Kwality brand of ice-creams.

The other two prominent players in the category are Gujarat Co-operative Marketing and Milk Federation's (GCMMF) `Amul', which launched a dahi 6-7 months ago. It already has `Shrikhand', a popular dessert in Maharashtra and Gujarat, in its portfolio. Mea nwhile, Mother Dairy, is tickling the Bengali palate with sweetened yoghurt (`Mishti Doi') which has also gained prominence in the northern markets.

While curd in its basic form is a routine dish in Indian households, marketers hope to generate excitement around the category by introducing unique flavours. ``Sweetened and flavoured yoghurt is expected to connote a certain amount of premiumness,'' sai d an analyst.

Dabur India, meanwhile, is not looking at this category for the time being, though it has presence in other dairy products such as cheese and milk-based jams under the brand name `Dabon'.

An official spokesperson for Dabur said that though the synergies were obvious, the company was not looking at yoghurt immediately. ``The price difference between branded and loose dahi is at least 20-30 per cent, which has posed to be a dampener in the category's growth,'' the official said.