Madan Singi, Director, Vegit

“Modern trade is growing in all aspect versus general trade with a change in consumer preference for buying products – leading to more basket sale (touch, feel and buy) in some case (touch, feel, taste and buy). Therefore, focus of RTC/RTE brands have gradually shifted to Modern Trade due to change in consumer buying preferences. The modern trade margins have gone up and it is difficult for medium and small brands to retain profitability with such high trade margins.Therefore, brands are facing challenges to do business with organised retail. It has become imperative to have a strategy to increase penetration in modern retail formats with a main objective of getting visibility for the product and seeing that the consumer likes it and picks it up. With our existing range of 9 SKUs, we are all geared up to add new variants shortly and take the count to more than 15. Additionally, we will focus on adding more outlets to the current number and also increase the depth of the existing stores. We are stepping up our promotional budget and plan to create awareness about our brand through an aggressive BTL activities such as wet sampling, trials, promotions, exhibitions, schemes etc. The company plans to target more modern trade outlets, hyper- and supermarkets and mom-and-pop stores across the cities. With availability in 20 cities at present, we plan to further extend our offering to tier II cities in near future. Vegit also plans to begin exports from next year to countries that have high Indian population. We are in the process to begin exporting our products to countries like the US, which has a high Indian diaspora. We expect to begin shipping our consignment in the next financial year.”