Competition leading to a lot more experimentation: Orkla MD

New Delhi: Surge in competition from smaller, regional, or digital-only brands is leading to a lot more experimentation, Sanjay Sharma, managing director at Orkla India, which makes MTR breakfast mixes and Eastern spices, said. “It's good that there's a huge amount of brands that are coming. In a category like foods, we need to experiment a lot more; need to do a lot more innovations.”

The company reported a year-on-year 10.4% increase in revenue from operations to Rs 659 crore in the quarter ended June ’26, with profit up 11.12% on-year to Rs 87.7 crore. It attributed revenue growth to broad-based momentum across categories, channels and geographies.

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Sharma said while the West Asia war led to significant disruptions on supply chain, the situation has eased to a large extent. “During the Covid pandemic, that was the first time the industry faced something which was completely uncertain and no one had a playbook on what you needed to do. But what Covid taught us was to be ready for any such thing; our teams learnt very well how to cope with the West Asia situation.” He said supply chain disruptions have diminished from 45 days to 15-20 days. “One advantage we got is that we’re large players so we could ship a large number of containers. It is clearly visible that the large brands have been able to survive; the small ones are unable to keep up.”

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Orkla, which recently fortified its existing products such as batters and other ready-to-eat breakfast mixes with protein, will accelerate the push towards nutrition across its portfolio, Sharma said. “The narrative has been that Indian cuisine is not healthy enough, and is nutritionally deficient. There is a certain section of society that gets influenced with these narratives. If we want to remain relevant to these sections of society, which is the younger cohort of consumers, we need to ensure that we cater to them,” he added.