Mumbai : BL Agro, one of India's leading FMCG companies, recently stepped into its foundation year and celebrated its foundation day at Parsakhera Industrial Area in Bareilly.
On this occasion, Indiantelevision.com caught up with the brother-sister duo BL Agro managing director Ashish Khandelwal and Leads Brand Connect (LBC) managing director Richa Khandelwal. LBC is an integrated communications and advertising agency and apart from handling other clients, is also the in-house advertising agency for BL Agro. They both had a chat about BL Agro’s brands – Bail Kolhu (the mustard oil brand) and Nourish, their advertising and marketing plans for the brands, about missing out on being one of the sponsors of one of the IPL teams, and more.
Edited excerpts:
On the company journey and how the company has evolved
Ashish: It’s a long story. This trade was started by my great-grandfathers back in the 1940s. The name of the company has been changed several times. The major transformation is when my father stepped into the business. He is a doctor, so his interest was more in quality control. And he started working on this in 1978.
At that time it was so that oil was usually adulterated, be it any kind of oil. But at that time, mustard oil was used widely. Back in 1978 to 1986, a lot of adulteration used took place in the edible oils industry.
My dad did not like this and he worked on it. That’s when, in 1986-87, he launched the brand Bail Kolhu, which was government recognized. This was the first step, but this obviously turned out to be a boon to spreading and growing the brand.
Since then there have been a lot of changes. I joined the company in 2000. My family thought that I should start looking after the business before I lose my way. I have been actively involved in the business since 2002 and our unit was set up then; it was semi-automatic. Only the bottle-filling was done by the machine, the rest of everything else was manual.
I also noticed that in terms of productivity, the labour had a problem if there was even a slight overload of work. We have seen quite a bit of rebellion from the labour group and the labour union from 2000 – 2010. Due to these and a few other incidents, we noticed that the quality of the product was being compromised. That’s when we decided to change the format and switch to fully automatic completely. That’s when the search began – I roamed all across Europe from 2012-2013. Finally, in France, came across a company called Cidel – we purchased the machinery from them and laid the first two fully automatic machine lines in 2014 – these were commissioned and set into production. That was a drastic change – because it was producing 400bpm (bottles per minute) which was thrice the amount we were producing in one shift. The manpower utilised in three shifts was about 2100 which went down to 15. Productivity increased, we were able to increase our spread, and it helped save on a lot of costs too – electricity, labour cost, resources – basically, in every way. Earlier we were making about 12,000 boxes in three shifts, now we were making 24,000 boxes in one shift. We put up our third manufacturing line in 2016.
On the bestselling product of BL Agro, which attracts the maximum revenue
Ashish: 100 per cent of my revenue comes from Bail Kolhu, so obviously, that is the bestselling product for me. Nourish is very recent – it was launched in 2015, and the range saw a boom in the covid and grew upwards when people started realizing the significance of eating healthy and hygienic. Prior to covid, it was just a name, an idea that we thought of diversifying into. Earlier it was only about volume, nobody paid attention to packaging and all those things, which have become important pointers now.
Nourish was launched on the demand of customers and distributors. From 2015 to 2020, we learnt about the different pulses and the other product offerings, did our research etc. From this month onwards, the sales for the brand Nourish would begin in a formal way.
On Nourish’s new launches of over 100+ products and the categories
Ashish: We have launched 80+ products under the Nourish brand. We have an idea, we have specified the products that we want to launch. But before that, the capacity of the plant needs to be 75 per cent – we have reached about 40-45 per cent. Within the next two quarters, we will achieve that 75 per cent of the capacity, and by next year we will decide whether to launch or not.
We are considering several categories which will be launched over a period of time, but as of now we will look at launching in the ready-to-cook category and will try to offer as many SKUs under this.
Once we have a strong hold in the un-cooked category, only then we will proceed to step into the ready-to-cook category.
On the competition in the ready-to-cook category, and breaking the clutter
Ashish: As our USP, we are looking at aseptic packaging, which has never been attempted by this category in India – this kind of packaging is about sterilized food being packed in a sterile environment. I was working on this in 2016-2017, wherein we had plans to launch in the juices category, but the plan changed. Covid set in and we thought that it was appropriate to look at food, so that’s why. And the machinery for aseptic packaging, can be used for solid foods and even liquids, so we decided to use the technology for the ready-to-cook range that we are looking at launching.
On the important markets for BL Agro, whether it comes to Nourish and Bail Kolhu
Ashish: The brands Bail Kolhu and Nourish are present across 13 states and 200 cities. The major markets for both brands include states like Madhya Pradesh, UP, Bihar, Delhi-NCR and Uttarakhand. And both brands are present across 75 per cent of the towns in these states.
70 per cent of the volume is coming from Bihar, UP, Uttaranchal and Delhi-NCR – this is the belt that consumes the maximum of mustard oil.
For Nourish, Delhi-NCR and UP are the significant markets.
On the expansion plans – digital, D2C, EBOs etc
Ashish: We are not opening any new EBOs as of now – the current number stands at 14. These EBOs are across Delhi-NCR, UP, Gujarat, and Rajasthan.
On the digital medium, we are available on e-commerce websites like Amazon, Flipkart etc. And we also sell our brands through the D2C route on our own website.
On the revenue/turnover for the year 2022 and numbers eyeing for this year
Ashish: We had a turnover of about Rs 3800 crore for 2022-2023. Our revenue was about Rs 100 crore.
The estimated turnover for 2023-2024 is about Rs 5000 – 6000 crore.
On onboarding Bollywood celebrities - Shilpa Shetty, Nawazzudin Siddiqui, Manoj Bajpayee and Pankaj Tripathi as brand ambassadors, and how has bringing them on board helped the brand
Ashish: Besides face recognition, I don’t feel there has been any other benefit for the brands. The public relates to them and there is a public demand for celebrity brand ambassadors, so that’s the reason why we brought them on board.
The fact remains that sales do not happen through brand ambassadors. You have to make an effort, maintain the quality of the product etc.
If we are trying to prove ourselves as a health-conscious brand, and because Shetty is related to health and fitness, so that’s why we have picked her as our brand ambassador. Similarly, we took the three brand ambassadors for Bail Kolhu, because they have a similar story as ours – of working hard to make their way up.
Richa: Well, we have three brand ambassadors because firstly, all these three come from a region which is our strong region for Bail Kolhu – Bihar, UP etc. Also, if we have three random brand amassadors then the brand image is definitely three times bigger than just one. Okay, so that is what we had considered and apart from that, all these three have been together from the time of Gangs of Wasseypur. And they're seen as complementary to each other and their converter is very good. And all these three are people who have worked, risen from the very ground level and reached a particular level in their careers, which is a very similar story of our brand also. So I think that is why we choose them.
On keeping the brand relevant and up-to-date with the latest media in the market
Richa: If you're talking about the brands Nourish as well as Bail Kolhu, we have already identified the growth of digital quite some time back, and we have been very active with digital campaigns. In fact, the latest campaign of Nourish is which was centered on the IPL - it is to leverage the IPL euphoria. So, we created a digital campaign wherein we created a specialized jersey for Nourish, and the campaign is called the Nourish Nutrition Champions. So, like there are various teams in the IPL, we have also created a pseudo dream team which is called Nutrition Champions, and we have designed a special jersey for that team. And we are giving away that jersey free to a lot of our customers through our website and the same campaign is being highly promoted on all the digital channels including our own social media, and other various sorts of activities. So yes, we are very active on digital for Bail Kolhu also. From time to time we keep on creating competition contests, and very interesting digital campaigns.
On highlighting the campaigns that you have done for Bail Kolhu and Nourish
Richa: Bail Kolhu as a brand has achieved iconic status. And particularly if you talk about the brand loyalty part of it, people who are consuming Bail Kolhu, they have become ardent customers of the brand for many, many years. So, for Bail Kolhu our strategy has been not sales-oriented but more brand-oriented, wherein we create engagement of the brand with the customers, we don't try to push the sales for that.
So, we have created a lot of interesting campaigns for brand engagement. One of them has been creating a comic character called Superhero Bail Kolhu. The Bail Kolhu bottle itself has a very typical shape. So we have carried forward that shape to make a superhero sort of character, which is a replica of the Bail Kolhu bottle. And through that character, we have tried to promote the almost lost reading habit among the kids, the book-reading habit because most kids these days have shifted to digital screens. Screen time has increased to almost harmful levels. So to bring those kids back to reading a book, we have created this series of comics, called Superhero Bail Kolhu comics. And we have printed these comics as hardcopy books, and we are distributing them free among various children, sending these copies along with our bottles to retail outlets. So, people who are buying Bail Kolhu anywhere, should get a free comic also.
Similarly, we have a platform in New Delhi railway station, which is named after Bail Kolhu – it’s Bail Kolhu Platform No. 16. There are platforms no. 14 and 15, which are branded under Nourish. So what we have done is because some time back, reading a comic or any book on the train used to be a very, very common thing. But now nowadays, the mobile phone has taken over books. Most of the time people inside the train, just keep on scrolling through their mobile screens. So to bring back that book reading habit among the kids, we have distributed the comics free of cost at the railway station. When boarding the train, they can carry the comics, and they can just read them through their journey.
The railway platform branding happened in October 2022, and the comic campaign was started in February this year.
For Bail Kolhu we also did a TV campaign called the Swaad Se Samjhauta Nahi and that time we had we had also an ongoing campaign called Rasode Main Mard Hai where we were promoting and had taken up a cause of pushing males to help women in the cooking process. And because we had our three brand ambassadors who are also males. Before, it is a very uncommon thing that for cooking oil, you would take a male brand ambassador. So we had shown all those three as you know, cooking in the kitchen, and to align with our thought process. That campaign was launched in April 2022.
For Nourish, we did a campaign in October 2022– Sehat Ki Sano Nourish Hi Chuno. For this campaign, we added Shamita Shetty, along with Shilpa Shetty.
On the advertising and marketing strategy and budgets that you have planned for the brand for 2023
Richa: We are looking at investing what we have earned as our revenue – Rs 100 crore – for advertising and marketing.
The Indian Railways has not permitted the branding/rebranding of the railway station platforms in every city. Immediately, we are looking at rebranding some platforms on the railway station at Lucknow. And if the platform is branded with Bail Kolhu, the comic distribution will be there.
Last year's strategy and the campaigns have given us a lot of good results, and for the next year also we are going to continue the same strategy We will be focusing on sales-oriented campaigns for Nourish - because nourish is a growing brand, young brand and it has achieved multifold success in the last couple of years. So, the focus will be on Nourish, and a lot of new products will be added. So the sales campaigns will be developed for Nourish. For Bail Kolhu, we are still going ahead with brand-oriented campaigns, creating more brand engagement with the customers, and making the brand a part of the customer's life.
On how earlier media plans used to be heavily TV-led, but now the game has changed with digital coming into the picture; and in terms of strategy, how much is the media mix for the brands
Richa: The basic strategy is to cover the entire spectrum of mediums. But yes, definitely over the years television spends are getting a little limited and the digital spend is very heavy. So, yes, we are going through that strategy - because the viewership that television enjoyed earlier, it is now shifted mostly to digital, even on the sports matches and video content, it is being viewed more on digital as compared to television. But since we have a lot of our customer base in tier II and tier III cities also where the television although it is decreasing, that rate is not yet fallen down because they're not as many cord-cutters yet. The cord cutters are mostly in metro cities. So television is definitely a strong medium for us.
We utilise print for only our trade promotion campaigns - not for reaching out to the consumer, not for brand purposes. But we use it for trade promotions, and for any specific promotion campaign that we're introducing.
On influencer marketing plans for the brand
Richa: Yes, we have plans, but we are very careful about it, because what has happened is that over the years, the customer or the reviewer has come to an awareness level where they understand which content is promoted and which content is organic. So we just don't want to place ourselves as being promotional content. So we are definitely focusing on influencer marketing, but only on those kinds of campaigns where there is a strong brand alliance and alignment with the influencer. It wouldn’t be just for views.
On IPL being a hot property, and how you plan to associate BL Agro with the game
Richa: We did think about it. We were in talks with one of the IPL teams for sponsorship, but for some reason, it didn't go through, so we dropped that idea. Instead, what we strategized was to create our own Nourish Nutrition Champion, to create our own pseudo team and a campaign around IPL which will take advantage of the IPL craze. We have already got around 1000 plus registrations.