Future Group enters into healthy snacking, baby food with Hain Celestial JV

The joint venture between Hain Celestial’s wholly owned subsidiary – Hain Tilda and Future Group will be looking at three broad categories of the fast moving consumer goods sector –organic chips, baby food and non-dairy products.

The American food company has entered into a 50-50 partnership with Kishore Biyani led Future Group and looks to have its first factory set up in Tumkur Karnataka by the end of this year, Biyani told the reporters present at the conference on Tuesday.

“Hain Celestial is one of the most respected companies in the organic and natural segment and we are excited to establish this partnership with Hain Tilda in India. Together, we will be able to provide Indian consumers with products that set the standards for good taste and are healthy too,” Biyani said.

While they will be starting production on the vegetable based chips like Terra in India, Biyani said that this would bring down the cost of the product to nearly Rs 100 per pack.

The merged entity will start working on its baby and non-dairy products shortly without giving a time frame.

The company will be focusing on manufacturing Hain Celestial’s ‘Earth’s Best’ in the organic baby supplements while in the non-dairy segment it will be focusing on products like Dream.

Commenting on the JV, Irwin D Simon, founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of The Hain Celestial Group said, “We believe this venture would bring great benefits to Indian farmers as we will be working on educating them so as to improve yield and cultivate new vegetables to manufacture Terra chips alone.”

He further added that they would be working with the farmers in a ‘collaborative farming’ initiative so as to use less soil and water and focusing on optimum farming.

The company will use Future Group’s existing infrastructure and Big Bazaar outlets for distribution of its food products which will be available all over India.

“We have already introduced the Terra chips in 165 big bazaar outlets. Once the product will be sold for Rs 100 it will be sold everywhere in India,” Biyani said.

Speaking about their strategy for mergers and acquisitions in India Simon said that they will be looking to absorb local startups.

Commenting on his decision to enter India, Simon said, “Considering that very few other markets were growing at 11% rate and with a population of more than 1.3 billion that also harbours 650 millennials, consumers are now focusing on healthy living.”  

With over 23 years presence in the wholesale and organic food division Simon said that they would try to ‘take what they have in the US and UK and implement that in India.’

Simon added that their operations in US and UK yielded $2 billion and $1 billion in sales turnover respectively.

“We will focus on bringing US brands to India and even source India for a lot of agricultural products that we can use in the rest of the world,” Simon added.