Learning from the impacts of COVID-19 and leading the path towards recovery has made the tough going
The Covid-19 problem has impacted all cultures and economies across the planet, and it will forever transform our globe as it keeps unfolding itself. While the crisis’s aftermath is amplifying old dangers and introducing new ones, upheaval on this scale also opens up new opportunities for managing systemic difficulties and better rebuilding of various industries.
Businesses all throughout the world had to respond quickly and decisively to the pandemic’s difficulties. As we enter the next stage of the recovery, now is the time for firms to seek out and grab the possibilities that emerge.
This entails doing an “after-action assessment” to collect data and insights on pandemic lessons learned, and then leveraging them to prioritise measures to improve company value today and develop strategic resilience for tomorrow.Food businesses that take these structured actions now will be better positioned to capitalise on the possibilities that will emerge in the post-Covid recovery – and to continue succeeding in their markets as greater predictability and stability.
In difficult times, people tend to turn more towards indulgent treats. And the pandemic has unsurprisingly prompted more of us to consume more snacks, more often.
But we’re not just buying and eating more snacks these days—the pandemic has also caused significant changes to our snacking habits and the types of snacks we’re craving. With many of these new trends set to stick post-Covid, the snacking industry has been forced into rethinking its long-term direction.
In recent years, the food sector, labelled as one of the primary markets of the twenty-first century, has come into its own full-fledged form. The last ten years have been particularly significant for the food and snack sector, with the industry witnessing a torrent of changes as a result of evolving client requirements and massive innovation. The number of challenges facing the food and snack business has increased significantly.
People are becoming choosier, opting fat-free and sugar-free foods, and are generally more concerned with their overall health. The fact that food is valued not just on its quality but also on its nutritional content supports this school of thought. This dynamic thought process has forced food companies to make considerable changes to their current manufacturing processes in order to successfully solve some of the food industry’s most pressing issues.
The mithai and namkeen business in India is one of the country’s largest and oldest. While Covid-19 caused a major drop in sales, the business is quickly rebounding, and sources predict that the sector will continue to develop at a rapid pace in the coming years.
The pandemic has changed the working style of the sector, hastened the use of digital platforms for product promotion and payment processing. Local sweets and snack manufacturers experimented with a variety of methods to digitise their operations and reach their consumers despite lockdown conditions during the pandemic, including the creation of their own e-commerce sites and collaborations with grocery e-commerce and delivery aggregators like Swiggy and Zomato.
Approximately 100,000 manufacturers throughout the country create 500 different varieties of sweets and snacks, giving employment to over 10 million people directly or indirectly.
The pandemic presented a unique opportunity for the food industry to become more structured through the modernization and automation of manufacturing processes, the adoption of new food packaging technologies, and a greater focus on sanitation and the use of healthier components in their goods.
The period of lockdown is regarded as a setback in all streams, yet the other side of the coin conceals a boon. The time period provided sufficient opportunities for planners to sit and think-rethink about how to implement big changes in conducting and moulding business to meet the new normals, as well as foresee what the world will look like when the crisis is over
The environment forced the businesses to think anew, whereby many outlets and showrooms made superb renovations, rebuilding interiors to suit the best for customers’ visits. Some counters are even equipped for contactless mithai picking and billing. E-commerce proved to be the safest platform for ordering favourites, and manufacturers made the best use of it.Covid-19 increased customer demand for immune-boosting and healthy goods. In response, sugar replacements, fruits, dried berries, nuts, and gluten-free components are being used by manufacturers of sweets and snacks. Some manufacturers are now making baked goods rather than fried goods.
The tendency of Indians for sweets and snacks, particularly during festivities and holidays, has allowed this industry to flourish immensely inside the country and, more recently, globally.
Some of the well-known Indian sweets and snack brands may be found in other markets, where there is still a lot of room for growth. With potential in consumer-oriented items including tree nuts, fruits, and spices, U.S. and European suppliers stand to gain from this demand.
This collection of interviews draws on the industry’s diverse perspectives to look ahead and consider where the balance of risk and opportunity may emerge across a wide range of issues – trade, governance, health, labour, and technology, to name a few. It provides decision-makers with a complete picture of long-term changes to expect, as well as motivation to take advantage of the chances presented by the recent catastrophe to better the world’s status.
Our first query placed before the interviewees drew very interesting replies, which Mithai and Namkeen Times have expressed in a well-composed narrative piece.
Assessing the challenges and opportunities faced during the post-Covid world, what measures were adopted by your company to overcome the situation?
“There were three primary problems that we faced and some constructive steps that we did take to overcome those challenges and turn them into opportunities for company and business development,” expressed Aishwarya Sakpal of Prashant Corner in Thane.
Cash Flow Difficulties: The entire business had ground to a halt during the shutdown time. There was no way to generate revenue. Although income had reduced, we still had to pay for capital expenditures such as bank repayments and operational expenses such as rent and wages. As a result, because everything ultimately depends on revenue generation, we had a significant problem stabilising the cash flow during the immediate post-Covid period.
Labour Disruption: During the lockdown period, many staff members travelled to their villages, and because of the travel restrictions, they could not immediately join the workplace, and even after returning, they were required to self-quarantine themselves due to control measures set at the district and state level. Measures relating to worker health and safety were given top priority.The body temperatures of all the on-site staff and customers were scanned, and they were told to wear masks at all times. The sanitation and disinfection of factories, offices, and all shops was done frequently.
Customer Attraction and Business: People avoided public venues since they were obliged to stay at home during the lockdown. As a result, during the immediate post-lockdown period, we had the difficulty of attracting consumers back to the business and winning their faith that food quality and sanitary standards had not been compromised. To address this difficulty, we considered the health of our clients and launched a new line of diet-friendly and healthful items.
In response to the same question, Risshi Bhatia of New Chhappan Bhog, Jamshedpur, stated, “Covid has proven difficult for the entire fraternity. It exposed us to new problems and yet introduced us to newer and better opportunities. People had stopped leaving their residences, and they were too terrified to dine out. Zomato was already doing well in the market, but we began personalizing delivery to consumers’ doorsteps. We increased our cleanliness standards, which assisted in raising the standardization of our manufacturing process. We started moving out of point of sale from our storefronts to packaged products to other retailers”.
Moving further with the interviews, a detailed reply given by Priyanka Bajaj, Sindhi Sweets, Chandigarh is narrated ahead.
According to Priyanka, “Roles and responsibilities were unclear, and we encountered bottlenecks in making decisions. Businesses have had to deal with a simultaneous economic and health crisis, which has necessitated the implementation of new employee and customer interaction protocols.
“The aftermath of Covid-19 has challenged every industry and put businesses in the difficult position of adjusting to new ways of working, and our food industry is no exception, and if anything, it was hit harder than most. Where many industries were able to adjust by working from home or providing remote options to employees, the nature of our business couldn’t adapt in that same way. Our industry suffered a devastating few years ago from mandates, poor employee retention, and chronic lockdowns.“The initial loss of business in our industry was, of course, due to the mandated lockdowns. National and state-specific regulations forced us to close for weeks at a time, leading to a sharp drop in sales, wastage of perishable stock, and eventually layoffs of employees.
Adding on she said, “When the world started to slowly reopen again and people were allowed back inside businesses, restaurants still faced a whole separate series of issues. For one thing, there was a massive drop in the desire to eat out.
As for the opportunities in the post-Covid period, to make up for the combination of fear and extended mandates, takeout and delivery became the norm. Sixty-eight per cent of consumers say they are now more likely to purchase takeout from a restaurant than before the pandemic-Priyanka
While delivery is a good addition to a standard restaurant, it’s unlikely to cover the sales needed to stay open. The loss is in huge percentage as we had to pay for online portals, but we were left with fewer alternatives.
“Vaccines were progressively used to inoculate citizens, but the process was delayed in several towns and states, and most restaurants were unable to open at full capacity. The restaurants had to adopt very rigorous Covid-19 procedures as a result of which client walk-in was at 50%, leaving us with about 25% sales. All of these new “normals” cost money, customers, and personnel for the sector. “Businesses were understaffed and lost money as a result of only being able to operate at half, 50, or 70 percent capacity.
“Looking ahead to 2022”, said Priyanka, “despite the fact that the food industry has been impacted harder than almost any other in the last two years, it still holds a great promise for the future!!!
Elaborating on the reply to the post-Covidworld, Sameer Seth,Founder of Bombay Sweet House, replied, “We opened Bombay Sweet Shop in Mumbai in March 2020 as a ‘Willy Wonka’ inspired mithai factory and experiential store offering a gamut of exciting and innovative reimagined Indian mithai. Our decision to create an offline retail experience was based on Hunger Inc. Hospitality’s core strength of creating quality F & B experiences and the assumption that Indian consumers were not yet ready to buy Mithai online, let alone be open to its reimagined avatar! However, the pandemic and subsequent lock-down made us rethink our initial offline retail strategy and move to a direct-to-consumer e-commerce store”.
Hemant Gehlot, of Mahendra Sweets, Vijayawada, replied that post-Covidthings in terms of operations have been pretty smooth. The sales have gone up as the mobility of people has increased after vaccination.
Though initially the circumstances were doubtful, gradually we are experiencing better business after the subsiding of the pandemic period. We hope to take our sales northward in our graphs.
The pandemic has taught us the better way of doing things by following regular protocols of sanitation and hygiene, packaging, and distribution. And now to keep food products fresh, manufacturers are strictly following regular inspections so that the products are cleaner and have higher shelf-life.
From Bangalore, Ramesh Dhanji Paddhariya, Founder, Mahalakshmi Mithai Ghar, sends his well-wishes and greetings. “Thank you for reaching out to us at Mahalakshmi Mithai Ghar for our point of view on your upcoming topic for Mithai & Namkeen magazine.
“It’s our privilege to share our experiences and thoughts here on the challenges and opportunities faced during the post-Covid world. We at Mahalakshmi Mithai Ghar, along with the rest of the world, have fought out the pandemic with unpredictable challenges for an extended period, and it hit us a little worse compared to our friends in the mithai & namkeen fraternity, as we are located in the heart of the city, “The Business Hub”, which slowed downed during the initial days of post-Covid. However, this didn’t stop us from doing our best as we worked hard and practically changed our approach towards being solution-oriented, which gave us the maximum results out of it.
In the initial days of post-Covid, our supply chain of raw materials got disturbed, resulting in slow pre-production along with running our business online.
However, to fix this issue, we started a reverse process of procuring the raw materials by our team visiting our distributors directly (early hours of the day, 5 am–7 am, which avoids maximum people contacts, traffic and is cost-effective as well), picking up our orders following strict Covid norms as we believed in safety first. Following this, we not only managed our business but also helped our distributors who were struggling to meet the demand due to distractions in their logistics – Ramesh
While bringing in this change, we started experiencing an improvement in pre-production as we were no longer waiting for our distributors to deliver our raw materials. Our team started the self-procuring process and our production started picking up speed, which was way back to pre-Covid.
Eventually, life was limping back to normal. We continued the same process by shifting our focus on the demand-side to meet the expectations of our valuable customers across the city. Here, we identified an opportunity to start the delivery process with the help of our delivery partners through which we are reachable to any corner of the city with fresh and delicious mithai/namkeen.
The lockdown moment gave ample time to incubate new strategies. Have you made any changes to the following pattern of doing business in terms of:1. Interior design for showrooms,2. Use of an online platform (e-commerce) 3. Packaging & shelf-life of your products
This query was a much-awaited one, which brought about favourable replies from our interviewees.
Aishwarya Sakpal said that they had worked rigorously on all three platforms.
“Regarding interior design, we came up with a new look for the outlets and have started changing the interior design of all our stores in order to give a luxury shopping experience to the customers. Of a total 10 shops, we have completed the renovation of five shops, and the renovation of other shops is in process.
“The use of online platforms (e-commerce) was a great experience. The pandemic has changed the traditional way of shopping. Customers no longer need to visit the shops each time in order to buy the products. We have also adapted to this way of doing business and made use of online platforms to get customer orders through WhatsApp and started a home-delivery service. We also partnered with the leading online food ordering and delivery platforms like Swiggy and Zomato and made sure that we met the customer requirements promptly.
“Yes, product packaging and shelf-life drew a lot of attention. We definitely focused on the packaging aspect and tried to make the packaging of the products aesthetically pleasing. However, we believe in providing fresh and good quality products to the customers and, as such, we did not focus on extending the shelf-life of the products since that would require us to use preservatives in the food items, which is against our primary objective of providing good quality products to the customers,” concluded Aishwarya.
Risshi Bhatia also gave his climatized input. We are still continuing temperature checks and sanitization at all our stores.We are in the process of developing sales through our app.On the interior end, we have started displaying our products in a broader format so that people can easily look at and choose options.
E-commerce was a new challenge, especially for small tier cities. We have still not moved ahead from 3rd party apps like Zomato and Swiggy, admitted Risshi Bhatia.
Adding on, Risshi said, “One of the best advantages we took out of Covid was improving our packaging and shelf-life of our products.” We installed MAP machines, which have helped us improve our shelf life and hygiene. We have also experimented with using oxygen absorbers to successfully pack our sweets”.“As far as the shelf-life of products is concerned”, Priyanka said, “we are definitely inclined towards increasing the shelf-life of our products to further increase our sales and, along with that, we are trying to maintain the freshness of our products without adding any preservatives to any product. The fact that sweets and savouries are both offered in a hygienic pack is giving a boost to the packaged food industry. The trend of gifting sweets and snacks as a part of Indian culture during social gatherings, such as weddings, festivals, corporate events, etc., has also created a tremendous demand for packaged products”.
“We haven’t made any interior or design alterations to our business”, Sameer Seth answered to the second portion of the narrative. “As India’s first direct-to-consumer e-commerce business, we wanted to focus on bringing the “magic of mithai” experience online. We have worked towards making the ordering experience through our website more user-friendly, seamless, and visually exciting. From the creation story, visual representation, and the anatomy of our signature offerings, we wanted to make the online ordering process self-explanatory and enriching”.
“The incredible response from guests, not just in Mumbai but the excitement and interest Bombay Sweet Shop generated across the country, encouraged us to think that we have a market for reimagined Indian mithai and savouries. Moreover, with the pandemic, guests felt more at ease ordering online, and we saw this as a great opportunity to take our online retail offering beyond Mumbai. We now deliver a selection of our retail offerings across the country. People no longer need to depend on generous friends living in Mumbai to carry sweet and savoury treats from Bombay Sweet Shop. With our all-India deliveries now live (through our website https://www.bombaysweetshop.com/ and Amazon), we hope to bring the “magic of mithai” into people’s homes across the country.
From all our retail offerings, we identified and created both sweet and savoury treats with a naturally longer shelf-life to include in our all-India delivery offering. “Packed hygienically and aesthetically, we want people to think of us when they want a thoughtful, indulgent gift for a loved one that’s hand-made and preservative-free,” enunciated Sameer.
“Apart from the ordinary upgradation of the interiors that we periodically conduct, there is no such thing as that relates to the post-Covid scenario,” Hemant Gehlot declared. “But we concentrated more on revenue growth, which was critical at the time.
“And yes, equal focus was and still is given to online platforms, and we are more focused on developing our e-commerce and having our own delivery and logistic supply chain.
“Speaking on the increased shelf-life of products, I did that after Covid. But I feel that people have gotten used to packed products, which is also an easy and quicker way. Even as a business operator, our focus has begun on the implementation of MAP and, more importantly, on attractive and eco-friendly packaging”, resolves Gehlot.
“Due to the pandemic, we don’t foresee any need for our sweets outlet to get any renovation,” explained Ramesh Paddhariya. However, we have opened our doors to online sales through our websites, social media handles, direct calls and our delivery partner’s platforms as we saw a slight drop in our customer’s footfall for that period due to our location. However, these online sources have shown their magic by which we are able to run the show better than pre-Covid.
This pandemic has shown and helped us balance our business, both in a traditional way as well as online, which we are get-going with enhancing based on the opportunity and requirements, as one should certainly adopt technology in addition to the new trend of business.
In terms of packaging, as we have adopted the traditional and online side of the business, we have also started working on the best packaging solution which can be suitable for our products by the ease of delivering the goods across the city.
Also, talking about the shelf-life of our products, it’s all natural as we believe in serving fresh, hygiene products as our aim is to consume the products within their natural shelf-life. We have also gotten feedback from our customers that they consume our mithais and namkeens within 2-3 days of purchase as they are cherished by all age groups in their respective families, completed Ramesh Paddhariya.
ConclusionDespite the industry’s persistent problems, solid improvements are projected in the future. The industry hopes the growth arrow will hit higher worldwide with the global demand for Indian sweets and snacks industry, which we are sure will perform to its pinnacle in the next few years.
With the local population now looking for novelties in products, outlets, and showrooms, we will soon be witnessing a boom in the ultra-modern presentation of food stores.