Indian Retail Has Witnessed Transformation To ‘Papad, Pickle And Pizza Principal’, Suresh Prabhu

During the Session ‘Retail in India base of billions Consumers’ Minister of Commerce and Industry Suresh Prabhu said, ‘this industry has a lot to achieve with the changing food habits of Indians and the rising income along with growing concerns about nutrition has also played a lot to deal with’.

A feature of his address was in the market with the possibility of reaching the end consumer and how the retail can play a major role in it. Prabhu had also emphasized on how retail can create the job opportunity. Processed food had several regulations already but the industry has to set very high parameters for it and for themselves, said Prabhu.

CEO of Future retails Sada Shiv Nayak focussed upon the seriousness of looking at the linkages of the market for retail and food and said that Future has its own experience of practising the entire business with certain strange examples where small towns had given great experiences in food retail. He had also explained of Suresh Prabhu’s vision of the transformation of old traditions to new and new to old as, ‘Papad, Pickle and Pizza Principal’. This principal signifies the importance of food processing where homemade things started coming in packets and vice-versa happened to pizza. Nayak has also focussed as to how retail can help doubling farmers’ income.    

The Chairman of techno park advisors, Arvind Singhal gave a serious and focussing insight of India’s entire retail trade. Singhal said India is going to be a USD one trillion retail market by 2020 which is hardly three years and food in addition with grocery will be USD 600 billion which is a huge part of this entire trade. Singhal has also focussed on how only the food service reaches some 75 USD trade in this projected one trillion mark.

Singhal also gave an interesting statistical analysis of how India has potential to reach from USD 1320 billion in private consumption from now to some USD 3354 by the year 2030. Traditional retail will remain key to food retail in India, said Singhal. With USD 14 billion urban market cluster only in Mumbai and Delhi NCR Singhal said that retailers had missed the biggest chunk (with 150 retail outlets only future retail had a little of it).

Retailers had missed 75 percent incremental GDP that may come from other than selective urban towns, said Singhal to which all of the retails started looking at figures with stretched eyes. Reaching to 1.3 billion people is a big challenge but it has been very much eased off by improvement of the mobile revolution, added Shinghal.

Supply Chain Management, focus on the ecosystem and retail channel focus may be the most important areas one has to focus upon in retail, said Singhal. He had also focussed on challenges that industry in retail has to face like; different geography and heterogeneity due to cultural diversity; issue of availability of quality real estate; the MRP regime; FDI policy by government, weakness in SCM and high fragmented sourcing will also prove to be bottlenecks of retail business while relating it to food processing, said Singhal.

Krish Iyer of Wallmart India has focused upon how it was a good response to see a major jump of India in ease of doing business Index by World Bank. He said it suggests the efforts are showing confidence in investors. Iyer also shared how he managed to open one store in Mumbai within 60 days with all the legal formalities completed. Iyer had given his critical observation of corruption at the operational level only as such people do not want to follow the law. An interesting observation by Iyer was how the numbers do not present reality in trade when he said that it appears that India has 1.3 billion numbers to speak but they are hardly the consumers.