Yogesh Chawla, Director Mahesh Namkeen
Looking at present scenario how are you planning to expand your area of sales and production points across the country?
We are expanding our market reach in each area to vast extend currently we have state of the art manufacturing facility at Lucknow only but we are planning to expand our units to cater North India. Now-a-days with the increase of automization the plants are running smooth and hence there is very less manpower dependency.
There is new technology being introduced every day in the market for increasing automation and food safety. What is the latest edition at your end in your existing units or in upcoming plants?
In the year 2004 we set up Thermic Fluid Heating system from Thermax Ltd. which was New Innovative process of heat transfer and first in the Namkeen Industry in India. Even to see the success of this technology some big players of namkeen industry came to see this technology. New Upcoming plant is being built with keeping in mind all required automation and food safety process are fulfilled. From pelletization to Production to Packaging to Warehousing and keeping all food safety practices under complete check, we are doing automation in every field to each process we have done also to reduce manpower dependency.
It has been observed that there are not many national brands in the snacks and namkeen segment in India. What are the reasons behind the slow expansion of the companies?
Namkeen and snacks industry has major drawback of taste preferences of various demographies that hinders to enter in those markets because of product acceptability. This is also a tough job to change taste as per every demographies and hence product is disliked where taste preference is not met.
Is the slow expansion also because of the local taste preferences? How import is the market research before going for expansion in newer territories?
It is very true that local taste preference varies from territories to territories and market to market. This is the reason some products are liked in one market and some in other markets. Market research is very important as every market has some gaps and advantages to cater with so from our point of view it is the major thing to do to enter a new market.
In the lockdown period and thereafter during the unlock process, there was an acute shortage of labour in the food factories. What measures you are applying now to reduce manpower dependency?
5.We are doing automization to reduce manpower dependency.