Filling up the Indian cookie jar

Baking a silent saga in the cookie space over the last 10 years, Unibic Foods has come a long way. What began as a quest to find a niche for itself in a biscuit and cookie market nurtured and dominated by traditional giants like Britannia and Parle, has set Bengaluru-based Unibic on course to define pure cookie pleasure for the Indian market, backed by a strong Australian heritage.

The story goes as far back as 2004, when Australian Michael Quinn visited India and sensed the need to introduce the country to premium biscuits and cookies. Partnering with Nikhil Sen and Dhruv Deepak Saxena, the trio set about evaluating the market’s challenges and opportunities, sniffing out that gap which they could fill up with their baked indulgences.

“The Indian market then served imported offerings (like Oreos and Chips Ahoys) which somehow came into the country almost six to seven months old, and not very fresh, while the best Indian offering was Good Day,” Sen, who is the Managing Director of Unibic Foods, tells DH.

In the early 2000s, the biscuit market was roughly divided into low price, high price, health and indulgence offerings. The low price segment was occupied by glucose (dominated by Parle G) at 50%, while Britannia Tiger held 20% market share, and Sunfeast barely made double-digits. Then there were brands like Sona, Priyagold and Biskfarm which did anything that the larger players did, but at a 20% discount, selling a value for money offering, by sacrificing margins. Also, there existed brands operating in a sort of ‘high on health, high on price’ segment.

The final option that Unibic observed was a ‘have a price, have indulgence’ space, with cookies, premium sandwich creams and indulgent crackers as potential offerings.

“We had the advantage on the virtue of our Australian heritage and wire-cut technology, and felt that’s what we must look at investing into as it would give us an edge over other players. This was an area where we could play innovator in the marketplace, by getting in new technology, and also pushing products which the Indian market hadn’t seen,” Sen says, reiterating that the company decided to play in the indulgence cookie arena. Those days, cookies had standard staple offerings of cashew, butter and chocolate, with players selling to a mass market. Unibic decided to set up shop at the top-end of the market, wanting to sell at a premium over the competition.

Unique bickies

Unibic has positioned itself on its uniqueness, not only in terms of variety in offerings, but also in the way it has sold products.

Today, the company sells 21 variants (Fruit And Nut, Honey Oatmeal, Cashew, Chocolate Chip, Muesli, Choco Nut, and Sugarfree, among others) in the cookie segment, across 100 SKUs (2-biscuit packs, 60 and 70 gms boxes, 15-200 gms family packs, pouches, display packs, cartons, tins, export range, and so on).

With ‘premium’ emerges the demand from discerning customers for a differentiated, higher class of products. What sets Unibic apart? Among other things, it’s the packaging, says Sen. “Any attitude test will tell you that a single act of consumption would be between 21 and 25 gms. Supposing I serve you cookies on a tray, you would normally have anything between two and three cookies. You would hardly go for a fourth, unlike a bag of chips. We thought, ‘Can we come up with something wherein, if we can’t charge a price premium, we could charge a weight premium?’ While the competition was at 100 gms, for 10 cookies at Rs 10, we came up with a 75 gms offering for 10 cookies at Rs 10, by which we would be able to provide the same perceived value to the consumer,” he says.

“And, people eat with their eyes first. Our tray made the product packs look much bigger, as you had three rows of four, three and three biscuits each. What we couldn’t spend on advertising, we spent on shelf display. Thanks to modern trade and standalone formats, we got some traction,” he adds.

Also, Unibic offered more in every bite. While the competition offered 2-3% cashew, Unibic gave 11%, and when the competitors were at 2-3% butter, Unibic was at 15%. With chocolate chips, Unibic offered 20%, while the others offered a half.

With cookies and biscuits comes the inherent annoying issue of breakage, be it at the factory or bakery stage, or at the store during handling. This problem was solved through technology, predominantly wire-cut.

Wire-cut technology is a widely-adopted factory baking technique abroad. At the factory, biscuits come out of a moulder, fully-made. In comparison, with wire-cut, dough is pushed through nozzles and gets precisely cut by a wire, with measured pieces hitting the oven. This artisan technology ensures that no two cookies are similar, allowing each to develop on its own, stronger and better baked. Traditionally, a wire-cut or a drop-deposited cookie would be richer than a standard moulded one.

Today, Unibic boasts of the biggest wire-cut facility in India, with five lines and a capacity to produce 100 tonnes a day. The production claims 95% localisation.

Baking Down Under

Strategising for the Indian market and diving deeper into offering unique treats, Unibic has heavily depended upon its ‘Australian heritage’. For trivia, honey n oat cookies have been synonymous with Australian and New Zealand soldiers during World War II. During those days, cookies were baked for ANZAC (Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) soldiers who left for the battlefront. The ‘ANZAC Cookie’ was one of Unibic’s earliest offerings, launched along with chocolate chip cookies (named Bradman Cookies in honour of Aussie cricket legend Sir Donald Brandman), as a private label for Café Coffee Day. Today, Unibic contract manufactures private labels for several leading airlines as well.

The Rs 27,000 crore Indian biscuit industry encompasses cookies, creams, crackers, marie (semisweet offerings), health offerings (digestives, milk biscuits), and glucose. Close to 30% is contributed by the cookie segment, which along with creams, is one of the largest segments, and at its premium end, is one of the fastest growing at around 15%, while Unibic is growing at 50%. Serving the spaces of traditional trade, modern trade, institutional sales, online, HORECA, defence, exports, and private labels, around 95% of Unibic’s revenues is contributed by its branded business. Having held significant share in South India, the cookie-maker now aims to gradually bake more ground pan-India, with more unique offerings and variants in the quarters to come.