New Delhi, May 1: Nuts and dried fruits player VKC Nuts Pvt Ltd is targeting sales of USD 1 billion (over Rs 7,650 crore) in the next five years, riding on the growth of the category propelled by increasing health awareness and expansion of its offerings, according to a top company official.
The company, which sells its products under the flagship Nutraj brand, expects around Rs 1,000 crore sales to come from exports and plans to invest about Rs 150 crore to set up processing facilities to meet its target.
As part of its five-year plan to expand the product portfolio, VKC Nuts is also introducing a sub-brand — ‘Nutraj Bactopure’, offering pathogen-free pasteurised nuts.
“We, as a company, have been growing at about a 25 per cent CAGR… We closed the year ended March 2022 at Rs 900 crore. We would have been Rs 1,000 crore had it not been for the lockdown last year during the Delta wave.
“For this year we have very aggressive growth plans, we are planning to target Rs 1,500 crore,” VKC Nuts Pvt Ltd Managing Director Gunjan Jain told PTI.
In 2019, the company had clocked sales of Rs 500 crore while in 2020 it was at Rs 742 crore, he added.
“The dream and the vision is to be a billion dollars (company) in sales in the next five years,” Jain said when asked about the company’s growth plans.
Explaining the reasons behind the optimism, he said, “One of the things is that the category itself is growing. If you look at it, because of the awareness of nuts and dried fruits, and health and immunity, the category is growing.”
The other factor, he said, is that VKC Nuts has taken up certain steps like creating marketing campaigns to promote its products, which it had never done before.
“We’ve never been a marketing company. We’ve never marketed ever. All the growth has been just pure organic where we’ve just done it on the sheer number of sales. This year we are (getting into) marketing,” Jain said.
Besides, the company is expanding its product portfolio with the introduction of the new sub-brand ‘Nutraj Bactopure’
“What we’ve tried to achieve here is that a new unique proposition is given to the customer, where (she or he) will get a guarantee for a bacteria-free product,” he added, adding the product has been tested in NABL accredited labs.
In order to meet its growth target, Jain said as part of the five-year roadmap the company will be setting up a processing facility for every additional Rs 300 crore of sales.
“To set up a good plant which can give us a throughput of about 30 tonnes a day, we are looking at an investment of about Rs 25 crore every new plant. The exact number (over the period) is about Rs 150 crore, that’s what we are looking to invest in,” he added.
At present, VKC Nuts has processing facilities in Jammu, NCR-Delhi, Bengaluru and Mumbai with a total capacity to process about 30,000 tonnes of nuts and dried fruits annually.
On the export front, Jain said the company has done it as a pilot project with about Rs 15 crore of sales coming from overseas shipments.
“So that’s something in the offing in the whole USD 1 billion plan that we have. We are targeting Rs 1,000 crore of sales in exports in the next five years…It is in phase three. We are looking at maybe 2025 for creating that whole export-based unit,” he said, adding that the priority in the initial phase remains the domestic market.
The company’s target markets include Middle East regions like Dubai, Bahrain and Kuwait along with Europe.
VKC Nuts, which sources 40 per cent of raw materials from the US, mainly California, and other countries like Chile, Australia, Greece, Turkey, Iran and Syria, is also seeking to play its role in the government’s ‘Make in India’ campaign by processing in the country and exporting the nuts and dry fruits after value addition, Jain said. (PTI)
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