How Bagrry's is Innovating its Products to Capture a Larger Share of the Breakfast Market

Bagrry’s is one of the leading brands of health foods and breakfast cereals in the Indian subcontinent. With a tagline of ‘let’s put health first’, the brand makes products that are healthy, honest, innovative and of exceptional quality. 

Bagrry’s has been a pioneer in India for products such as Muesli, Oats, Oats for India, Bran and its range now includes many more healthy foods such as Corn Flakes Plus (with 2X Fibre), Protein Muesli with Added Whey Protein, Makhanas and Super Food range comprising Quinoa and Chia.

At Bagrry's, quality is an obsession and the brand strives that only the best ingredients from across the world make it into its packs. 

“The key has been to stay focused on what we want to do and what we want to deliver. So from inception, we've focused on really our core values in using the finest ingredients from around the world making high quality, innovative breakfast foods that make a difference to our consumers’ lives,” states Aditya Bagri, Director, Bagrry’s Group.

Innovations Introduced

For over 25 years, the brand has aimed at setting new standards in innovation, responsible nutrition and quality manufacturing. Over the years, the brand has created products that have helped its consumers live a fit and healthy lifestyle, as it believes ‘nutritious and high-quality food is a right, not a privilege’. 

“One of our recent innovations is in the category of cornflakes. We did not enter the category for a very long time and when we entered, we introduced fibre infused cornflakes making them prebiotic or higher fibre cornflakes, which reduce the sugar spike impact. Apart from this, we managed to create a granola with a very optimized level of healthy oil and used premium ingredients such as California Almonds on the Belgian Dark chocolate in our chocolate granola. In our fruit granola, we've added 30 percent fruits and nuts, and none of them is with added sugars. Our other innovations include introducing products like steel-cut oats, unsweetened nut butter, oats atta and a lot more,” he asserts.

The brand is planning to launch more such innovative products every few months going ahead. 

“Nutrition bars and masala oats are a few categories where you should see some play from us in a fairly short span of time,” reveals Bagri.

Technology Integrations

Apart from this, the brand has made big investments in food safety. 

“We've got X-ray systems from Japan, which very few food brands have around the world. We are also using machine learning to identify the impurities, which a normal metal check or a normal scan cannot match. So this is a commitment that we have towards food safety, where we want to be equivalent to some of the finest brands around the world,” he explains.

“And on the sales side, we've done salesforce automation, which is something that we rolled out a few years ago, where we get some more analytics on what consumers are buying, or from going through channels such as e-commerce, get analytics, of products our consumers are buying and that learning is helping us develop better products,” he adds.

Marketing Strategies

Traditionally, Bagrry’s has always been a below the line brand. So, the brand has never done a TVC or used mass media to advertise its products.  

“Going ahead, we are looking at using social media and digital marketing. It is a very focused digital strategy where we've tied up with good agencies, which understand advertising, both helping us out in influencer marketing as well as digital marketing. And the idea is to communicate what makes us different,” he states.

Future Plans

The group’s manufacturing facilities are located in Delhi, Baddi (Himachal Pradesh), Newai (Rajasthan), and Bulandshahr (Uttar Pradesh). These facilities are equipped with state-of-the-art technology for high-quality food processing.

The brand is also working upon its D2C channel where it will offer the products made exclusively for the D2C consumers along with the other products.

At present, almost 20 percent of its revenue comes from e-commerce, which is significant because it was in single digits before the lockdown and it is increasing every month. 

“We are expanding our presence in Tier-II markets and beyond by taking things step by step, finding the right retail touchpoints because not all of them are valid for our category. Definitely, e-commerce had a major role to play in introducing Tier II and Tier III consumers to the category. The idea is to get consumers used to our products in contrast to just immediately garnering a lot of sales. Tier-II and Tier-III are significant opportunities as opposed to the more saturated Tier-I cities,” he asserts.

As far as global presence is concerned, the brand is targeting to have a presence in at least 20 countries over the next couple of years. Apart from this, the consumer business of the group has been growing significantly year on year. 

“Every year we’ve been growing at 20-40 percent in terms of consumer business. We’ve also added senior resources this year and we are expecting to scale this to a multi-category business in the coming years,” he concludes.