The Food and Beverage brands were opting for a direct-to-consumer model to create a direct connection with the customers. COVID also gave them a chance to directly sell their products without the involvement of restaurants and retailers. According to research, the food and beverage industry is the fastest-growing market and the e-commerce sales in the category will rise by 15-20% by 2025.
Panelists included:
- Devanshi Chitlangia, Co-Founder, Chaika
- Gaurav Khemka, Founder & CEO,Polka Pop
- Jasmine Kaur, CEO & Co-Founder, The Green Snack Co.
- Nitin Bhardwaj, Co-Founder & Radiohead Brands – Jimmy’s Cocktails
- Nitin Vishwas, Co-Founder, Moonshine Meadery
- Rahul Aggarwal, Founder, and CEO, Coffeeza
- Sneh Jain, Co-Founder &MD, The Baker’s Dozen
And the session was moderated by Aamir Shafiq, AVP Marketing & Communications, GreenHonchos.
Key Points:
- Future of the Food and Beverage
- Industry in the D2C model
- Creating a Food and Beverage brand
- Meeting the new-age customer’s demands
- The emerging trend of a subscription-based model
- New-age marketing technologies for the brand endorsement
Quick commerce is turning out to be the next generation of e-commerce, and as the name suggests it is all about quick delivery. Q-commerce is a game- changer in the e-commerce sector and major brands are diving into it by offering goods in less than 10 minutes.
Sneh Jain, Co-Founder &MD, The Baker’s Dozen commented on this and added, “Food is an interesting sector when it comes to online purchasing behavior. I believe that as a food brand you need to present across all the platforms on the D2C website, and marketplaces so that the brand can build customer relationship effectively. As the food sector is mainly about the availability-led portfolio, people are not willing to wait and now they are looking for online purchases and see whether the product is available on the website or the marketplace. So, it doesn’t make sense to be only available on just one platform.”
He also talked about quick commerce and stated, “The one-day delivery has now become past, but talking about 10-minute delivery I don’t know whether it will be stable or not. Going forward, I believe that it will settle down to 2-3 hours. Whether the players like Amazon and Bigbasket will set or the new players will jump in and change the game. I don’t know where the dust will settle and how many players will exist in two or three years. But this is a trend, which is going to stay and will stabilize in a 2-hour window, according to me.”
Devanshi Chitlangia, Co-Founder, Chaika also added here, “I believe quick commerce is more like an enabler. For a person like me who does the last-minute packing when going for a vacation, quick commerce here for consumers like me, has become a game-changer. I also believe that quick commerce is not just a threat for us, but it will be a threat to modern trade/ general trade and Kirana stores as well. But for a D2C brand, it’s a great opportunity as well as it adds one more channel to reach the customers.”
Customer- ownership space
Talking about the rush the food and beverage industry is facing in the D2C ecosystem, the experts from the sector shared with us a piece of advice that can give your business huge success. Jasmine Kaur, CEO & Co-Founder, of The Green Snack Co. highlighted and said, “I believe that a great mentoring to track the business is to see repeat business. This can help you see whether the customer is buying only due to deep discounting, offers, or the availability of your brand on a particular platform. One of the things will make you know if the brand will succeed in the long run or not. As a brand, you need to see the repeated number of customers and look to grow the business in an organic manner. One can spend ridiculous amounts of money to acquire customers. I haven’t said we have not done that but after some time we understand that it’s not sustainable. It’s important to own the customers, which my website allows me to do but the other platforms don’t. At the end of the day, the product speaks for the brand and with a good product and delivery timeline as promised can add credibility to your brand and add value to the customers. Then there is a high chance of customers coming back to your brand irrespective of the discounts/offers.”
Nitin Vishwas, Co-Founder, Moonshine Meadery also mentioned his learnings and told us, “Largely from the e-commerce data-driven world now, as a brand we don’t know the end consumer and who will be our customer. For us, it’s important to build brand loyalty. Like in our case, if you chat on our Moonshine Instagram page then you will chat with a human that will have a personality and if you call on the number written on our bottle then the customer will reach me. The whole idea is to bring down a brand to a level of personalization and make the customer feel that they know each other.”
He also said “Loyalty will wave away and the brand can lose the customers when another new cool brand forays into the market. Because when the loyalty veins for a shorter period of time, the customers will come back to you thinking that it’s their brand. The whole idea is to always feed the top of the funnel, stop trying to target the middle because word of mouth matters the most when you do little things that can’t be scaled.”
