Varun Berry on cheese business and Britannia’s JV with Bel

“The cheese consuming category is poised for even greater growth in the coming years because currently less than 5% of the households have ever consumed cheese and that is a really low number because we have the QSRs teaching consumers how to consume it which we will leverage and we are hoping that we will be able to make this a blockbuster category in the coming years,” says Varun Berry, VC & MD, Britannia

On the joint venture with Bel group for cheese
The cheese market in India is nascent as you know but growing fairly rapidly at about 23-24%. The objective will be to grow faster than the market partner with the big brothers that we have in the cheese category and take some share out of the entire category as well.

I think that this category is poised for even greater growth in the coming years because currently less than 5% of the households have ever consumed cheese and that is a really low number because we have the QSRs teaching consumers how to consume it which we will leverage and we are hoping that we will be able to make this a blockbuster category in the coming years.

After this JV with Bel, what happens to rural India? It is yes to be penetrated by the cheese category but overall what is your sense about how the rural recovery is shaping up?
Rural has not been doing as well as urban and that is very clear, but for us it has been a different story. We were predominantly an urban company and we have been improving our distribution. We have been going down the pop strata and making our products available in the rural areas. So for us, rural areas have been performing extremely well but even today, our presence in rural areas is not as good as it is in urban areas. We have many years to go before we see this plateauing off. So, our outlook on rural areas is fairly good from a distribution standpoint.

Does fairly good translate to a better volume growth trajectory?
Volume is a little tepid at this point in time but it is not negative. While revenues are growing reasonably well, we are happy with it because it will take us some time to get to double digit volume growth.