"We offer the customer what they want, not what we have" – Pansari Group

Founded in 1940, Pansari Group was built on the fundamentals of safe, healthy, and nutritious home-cooked food. With a product range focused on consumer holistic health and well-being, Pansari Group offers a range of edible oils, specialty rice and flour products, and instant Indian mixes in North India. With a growth rate of over 35% and a work strength of over 600 people, Pansari Group has worked with industry experts and leaders in the FMCG sector.

Pansari Group, a 3rd generation business, started as a 'Pansari Ki Dukaan' in 1940. With a production capacity of over 500 metric tons per day and units in Alwar, Rajasthan and Kolkata, the company sells its products PAN India and abroad. Speaking about the instant mixes range, Shammi Agarwal, director of Pansari Group, says, "We focus on healthy home-cooked eating that adds convenience to everyone's lives as a brand. The products offered by us can be easily cooked at home and tasty as outside products. For instance, our latest product range - INDIMIX - is a way of bringing the taste of outside food into our kitchens. This instant food range helps save more time and replaces outside food with healthy options."

As a consumer-driven FMCG brand, Pansari Group's primary focus remains on innovating the product packaging. Also, the company keeps on including more products concerning its consumers' needs. For example, Pansari Group is one of the top companies in India to introduce the fortified rice category.

Innovation backed by customers' feedback & market research

According to Agarwal, their top priority is making all the products healthy as a household brand. He adds, "We have been using automation — air-controlled units to control moisture with technological advancements. At the same time, taste also becomes a concerning factor because everyone wants to eat tasty food. We try to attain good taste through R&D and marketing research. We keep experimenting with the taste to give something new to the customers now and then."

Sampling, surveying, and finalizing the product based on the feedback remains the key to Pansari's success. Pansari Group came up with a new product range - An Indimix. So, before launching that in the market, the company did the proper research and got the idea of its customers' tastes and health-consciousness. "We also did a competitor analysis as it helps us understand what the competitors are offering and what we can offer accordingly. We try to pick the best product from the market and do even better than that. Once the product is finalized, sampling is done, and products are developed based on genuine feedback."

He believes, "A good FMCG brand should make a sample size package of their new products and sell it in the market to understand the taste and likes of its customers. In the end, we are here to offer the customer what they want, not what we have. It is not an overnight process, and it takes time. Different things are implemented on each product, and no specific pattern we follow."

Focus on single-use packs

Most people now have nuclear families, which is how household consumption is also reducing. Everyone wants to consume fresh products - especially after coronavirus. Agarwal also states that nobody wants to store eatables for a long-time time, due to which every company is bringing small packaging for its products. "We have to make a high-speed and efficient supply chain, keeping in mind the quantitative needs of our consumers. That is why small packaging works more in today's time than big packets."

Growth & strategy

Pansari Group's products are available on almost all platforms, including Bigbasket, Reliance Jio, Amazon, Flipkart. Agarwal feels that it is essential to have a digital presence as the industry grows these days. The online market is growing well 4-5X year to year in terms of industrial growth. After COVID, people have shifted to online shopping - ease of getting products at home.

Speaking about the vision, he adds, "We have recently launched Flour and Indimix range, and now we will soon be introducing more products in demand. We expand our geographical locations and reach West Bengal and Rajasthan, Mumbai, South India. We are growing in terms of geography as well as in terms of products which are more in demand. We will aim to add 50% growth this year from the last year's sales. "