HomeBusiness NewsFestive season, lower mortality rate led to recovery in urban demand: Parle’s Mayank Shah

Festive season, lower mortality rate led to recovery in urban demand: Parle’s Mayank Shah

The third quarter is expected to be a quarter of demand recovery for the FMCG sector, said Mayank Shah, Senior Category Head of Parle Products on Tuesday. Rural growth is likely to continue while urban markets are expected to recover, he added.

By Latha Venkatesh   | Sonia Shenoy  January 19, 2021, 1:50:54 PM IST (Updated)

The third quarter is expected to be a quarter of demand recovery for the FMCG sector, said Mayank Shah, Senior Category Head of Parle Products on Tuesday. Rural growth is likely to continue while urban markets are expected to recover, he added.

"Demand during the peak of lockdown was very high, post things started opening up in the second quarter onwards. The packaged food demand was slightly moderated, not high as it was but still much higher than what it was in the last year," said Shah.

He added, "In the third quarter, we saw urban demand reviving which was impacted because of the lockdown. Revival in demand was led by two things in urban India, one was cases going down, mortality rates going down, and the second thing was—it was largely driven by festive season buying plus revival in demand coming in from modern trade as well is the result of that."

On the industry growth, Shah said, "In the pre-COVID year the category was growing at somewhere around 8-9 percent and we are expecting that going forward the category would be growing at 15-16 percent almost about 2x. This is largely because of consumer propensity towards trusted brands."

Shah is very confident that they would probably see double-digit growth in the next two-three years.

RS Sodhi, General Manager of Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation said, "Demand this year was much better than 2019, in case of food consumer this year has shifted from unbranded to the branded products."

He added, "HoReCa which was totally closed down now up 60-70 percent. HoReCa is opened up."

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