Two industry officials, citing data from research firm Nielsen, said that regional ready-to-drink beverage brands including, Bovonto, Kashmira, Runner, Sosyo, and Jayanti Cola, altogether grew twice more than the national players like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo in 2019.
All the local brands together have increased their value share in the non-alcoholic ready-to-drink retail beverage market to 24% last year. It is almost half the size of Coca-Cola, the leader of the industry, and ahead of 19.6% of PepsiCo.
The joint managing director of Chennai based Kalimark group, J Ramesh, said, “Despite the rollout of goods and service tax (GST), we grew significantly over the previous year.” He continued, “While we don’t have bandwidth of multinationals in terms of budgets, growh indicates the potential of regional brands.” He added that, currently it is only available in Tamil Nadu, the Bovonto brand is being extended to other South markets too.
Coca-Cola India spokesperson said the company is committed to expansion. “We recognize that there are diverse consumers across the country and continue to focus on building consumer-centric portfolio, including catering to regional and hyperlocal tastes.”
A spokesperson of PepsiCo India claimed that the sales growth of their company’s beverage is ahead of the industry growth stated in the Nielsen research data. He also said in an email to ET, “we are currently seeing a huge uptick in our business with all the brands in the portfolio showing very good momentum and gaining consumer equity.”
According to the available data, PepsiCo India’s share fell by 2.2% and Coca-Cola grew by 0.5% in the year 2019. Owing to client confidentiality Nielsen declined to validate the numbers.