The great chutney makeover
In May 2012, a brand of sauces, chutneys and pickles called Chatkhaar started making tiny ripples in small pockets of Karachi. Slowly the brand’s presence spread – not to other parts of the city but to the internet, where it may well be the only Pakistani sauce and chutney brand that can be ordered online for onward delivery to the customer’s doorstep on a COD basis.
Chatkhaar is a brand of Naurus (Private) Limited (NPL), a company known in the 80s and 90s for its red sherbet. However, after going through internal changes in 1996, the Naurus brand was not advertised for several years despite retaining a presence in the market. During those years, NPL launched a range of pickles, sauces, ketchup, chutneys and chicken spreads under the Sundip brand name. Then, about two years ago, NPL stopped producing chutneys under Sundip and started working on Chatkhaar.
Haris Shaikh, Director Marketing, NPL, says that the company wanted to focus on reinventing the flailing chutney category, a category he said was “dead, with companies having lost their focus.”
To achieve this, NPL decided an entirely new brand was needed and thus Chatkhaar was born, with a product range of six chutneys, five sauces and one flavour of pickle.
However, in a move that is somewhat surprising in this category, Chatkhaar is not widely available via traditional retail; it has only a limited presence in certain Mahi Seafood outlets and some general stores with the bulk of selling done online.
Shaikh says this is because Chatkhaar is in an experimental phase and NPL did not want to put resources into trying to convince retailers to carry what is currently a very small brand.
“We thought it would be a better idea to push the product via social media and the internet and build sufficient hype and market interest to motivate consumers to ask retailers for the product; then retailers would come to us instead of the other way around.”
Has the strategy worked?
“Well this is not a quickie solution; we expect that the entire process will take a year.”
In another move contrary to the overall ketchup and sauce category, Chatkhaar is packaged in high quality glass bottles (the trend is to package sauces in pouches to reduce cost and ultimately the retail price).
This is because Shaikh wants “people to be proud of this bottle.”
As a result, Chatkhaar has spent significant time and resources on logo and package design, both of which were done by an international designer.
The inevitable result is that Chatkhaar is priced at Rs 150 per bottle, a steep price for chutney and Shaikh concedes that people have complained about the price. However, he points out that Mitchell’s chutney sells for Rs 180. (The comparison is perhaps a bit unequal, considering Mitchell’s 80-year history as a provider of quality ketchup and sauce.) Also, Chatkhaar’s current price is ‘introductory’ and Shaikh says the company will increase prices closer to Eid-ul-Azha.
For the time being, Chatkhaar has chosen not to advertise and is selling mainly through peer reviews and recommendations on social media. Shaikh says the company wanted to experiment with how people would react if they didn’t have to go out and buy the product. So far the experiment seems to be successful; however whether this will prove to be the great chutney makeover remains to be seen.