Times Private Treaties Say Ready to Eat Now Ready to Grow

June 1, 2010 - PRLog -- The Ready to Eat (RTE) category is now ready to grow as small Indian companies are using high technology food packaging processes to bring traditional Indian food to the table. With ready to eat food closer to home cooked food, Indians are fast adopting to Ready to Eat food ranging all the way from Jeera Rice to Aloo Paneer, curries to quick fries, cakes to desserts and much more.

The Indian RTE market  today is estimated to be worth INR 800 mn and shows huge potential for growth by tapping into a larger consumer base and changing lifestyles. Increase in nuclear families, growing working class families, growing working women base and rise in their disposable incomes are a few market drivers.

However, like any other evolving, high growth consumer segment,  industry players have to deal with various challenges; key ones being consumer’s behaviour and perceptions towards RTE food, inefficient logistics and infrastructure with a need for creating strong trusted brands and significant product differentiators amongst the target audience.

This has also led to some private equity action in the RTE category  with companies in the past trying to raise funds to manage product innovation, expansion, logistics and branding.

For instance, Capital Foods had received investment from Indivision I, a private equity fund.  Capital Foods is a manufacturer and marketer of packaged food products. In India, Capital Foods markets & distributes packaged food products under the brands of Ching's Secret (Chinese cuisine), Smith & Jones (Continental cuisine), Mama Maria (Italian cuisine), Raji (Indian ready to cook) and Kaeng Thai (Thai Cuisine).

Another company, Verjinia Foods Limited, has entered into an alliance with Times Private Treaties, to reach out to  large number of metropolitan and large city dual income families, young working adults of the IT and BPO industry.

Verjinia Foods is among those companies which are leading the growth in the segment and givinga good fight to some of strong brands in the category. Having food like home is now coming straight from the kitchen and fresh in packaging. For Verjinia, it was actually coming back to home after years of exporting packaged Indian food to the Indian diaspora.

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