SIL: Second coming

The new owners, who relaunched the brand last month, faces a tough task.

Remember SIL jams? The brand, which had a memorable ad campaign that featured a grownup boy crying like a baby for a spoon of jam, had almost disappeared from the markets after FMCG major Marico sold it to Scandic Food India, , a subsidiary of Danish food major Good Food Group, in March 2008.

Marico’s logic: Jam was not the company’s core brand.

Under the new owners, SIL has managed a 5 per cent market share in the Indian jam market. Not a great going, considering that the food market has been growing at a fast pace in India. “Since parting with Marico, we have had to build the brand from scratch both in terms of sales, distribution and the product portfolio,”explains Ravi Chandra, sales & marketing head, Scandic Food.

But Scandic now wants to be on fast-forward and a bigger slice of the Indian foods market. Result: last month, it relaunched the brand and made SIL an umbrella brand for jams, sauces, dressings, baked beans and sweet corn.

On the product portfolio front, Sil has extended itself from merely a jam brand to ketchups and juices. In ketchups, it has two variants – Funmato and Hotmato. All this, Chandra hopes, will help it achieve its target of a double digit market share in the juice and ketchup categories.

The jam brand has also been extended to three more flavours – something market leader Kissan from Hindustan Unilever has already done. Over the next year, SIL plans to add newer variants to its portfolio.

Distribution too is being ramped up. As of now, SIL is present in 250 towns covering 53,000 outlets. The company is targeting to ramp it up to 800 towns in this financial year, with a focus on smaller towns.

However, that will be a big challenge considering the low penetration in the categories the company operates in. Anand Halve, co-founder of brand consultancy firm Chlorphyll, feels that will pose a big problem for Sil. “There are some categories that excite people with the possibility of becoming big, but never quite do. Jams, jellys and spreads fall under this,”Halve points out. Aware of that, Chandra says, “India is not a jam or ketchup consuming market, which is why it is up to us to build the category and create demand in smaller towns.”

To achieve that, it is now launching smaller pack sizes that will naturally be priced lower. Thus, for instance, its jams now start from 100 grams and go up to 500 grams. Moreover, the company has now increased its production capacity as well as its advertising budgets.

Halve, however, remains skeptical. “Unfortunately, jams and sauces will remain only a small peripheral category.”On top of that, SIL will have to grapple with intense competition. In jams, for example, it faces competition from Kissan which has a whopping market share of 65 per cent. Similarly, in the sauce space Maggi rules the roost with 41 per cent market share followed by Kissan with about 26 per cent. Further, with newer players Heinz and Del Monte jumping on the bandwagon, SIL will have to compete with as many as seven brands.

“SIL could have been huge as a fruit-based spread but now it has to contend with international biggies which have just about begun its marketing initiatives,”adds Halve.