 Hello and welcome to Convysite eforum webinar on consumer eating habits post COVID-19 we have a we have a list of esteemed panelists here with us. I would want to thank our presenting partners Convysite for this amazing session that we're about to have. Without taking eating into much of the time of the speakers I would quickly introduce our speakers. First of all about our presenting partner Convysite. Convysite is the largest and the most loved platform by community builders and leaders. Grow and manage their communities on Facebook. More than 4,000 admins trust Convysite to grow and manage over 90 million members in their communities which is Facebook groups. It also helps brands engage with existing communities for supercharged social listening and purpose-led marketing campaigns and build communities from scratch. We have Tamanna Dhameja with us who is going to be our panel chair. Manna who is the CEO and co-founder of Convysite. Before building Convysite she has also built India's largest parenting community with over 2 million moms and has been acknowledged and certified by Facebook on community building. Next we have Pawan Singh who's the deputy manager marketing Amul. His marketing head of Amul India his portfolio includes Amul's flagship David categories along with a wide range of emerging and upcoming product categories. We have Mr. Vincent Narohona, Vice President Marketing, have more ice cream with over 10 years of experience in brand marketing, product innovations, digital and traditional media promotions and brand campaigns. In the past he has also worked with brands like HD, NDTV and HUL for leading their product innovation and business and brand building various brands under these. Then we have Mr. Adit Kohli, Community Head, Delhi Foodies as a working professional who is now full-time community entrepreneur. He had started food community six years ago and has now scaled it into multiple communities across different domains food being the largest. Over to you Tamanna. Thank you Tasme. Hi everyone very nice to be talking to all of you on this exciting topic on you know how the food industry has changed post COVID. As Tasme said I'm the co-founder of Conversite. Before Conversite we started our journey by building Baby Destination so and Baby Destination we started creating Facebook groups from others. So that's the community that we have. We have about 30 Facebook groups with two million moms. A lot of them are around food, food for infants, food for toddlers and food for weight loss and food healthy food for families, also food for weight gain and that's how the communities are. And then Conversite is a platform now where community admins specifically Facebook group admins use our tools to manage their day-to-day community management task but also monetize with relevant brand partnerships. A lot of what we do at Conversite is a link to insights and it's all conversational insights and which is where you know some of the questions that and the items that we'll discuss really comes from the insights that we see in conversations. What I'll do just to kick this off is I'll you know share my screen and just talk about a couple of trends that you know we have seen especially post COVID. So one is just you know needless to say right after the pandemic right when we were all started dining in versus dining out like as Adid says it this is what happened to the category conversations right. There was a massive spike this went up to being 4x and then you know that has that has remained. People who never stepped into the kitchen stepped into the kitchen and stepped into the into the kitchen with no help. So this is one what's interesting is pre and post COVID. I'm just highlighting some of the charts here there was so much data but you know there's some interesting charts that I wanted to show. If we just look at Indian desserts versus non-Indian desserts and especially cakes this is pretty much how the sheriff voice looked pre COVID and which is you know we were primarily a lot of conversations were about making Indian desserts at home and post COVID as you can see it has been sort of you know flipped and this is even higher now towards cakes. So all kinds of cakes right ovenless cakes and Oreo cakes and Oreo just as a keyword has become like a part of every recipe. So it's been super interesting there. Immunity needless to say every single subcategory that we look at. So overall immunity conversations have gone up five times and pretty much all of the conversations right after COVID had immunity in it right. So what are immunity boosting food right. Suddenly food just became centered around immunity. So what's interesting to see is even so many months after every single subcategory. So this for example is a breakfast category for adults and the reason I think I'm showing breakfast here because breakfast category in itself had a steady increase right. So this is it's interesting how the breakfast category right April May June continued to go up and stayed there but within the breakfast category immunity was still like 24% conversations were still linked to immunity right and this wasn't present before COVID right like when we were talking about breakfast we weren't talking about immunity. This is another interesting this is sort of factors within the beverage category. So just beverages right tea and coffee and where again immunity. So it's more like green tea for immunity or homemade you know immunity boosting teas. So these are just some of the trends which you know are sort of something that we've not seen in tens of years is now happening. So I want to kick off the conversation by Pavan asking you a question that you know Amul has it's been all of our loved brands right. We all grew up on Amul and Amul butter and I'm here in New York you know and and my parents like they still love Amul butter so I have to go to an Indian grocery store and get Amul butter for them. But my question is with with this wide sort of range of products and I'm not coming to the new products yet but the existing sort of dairy products. What were the products where you saw a spike and you saw sort of a decline in demand post post COVID and and and what was the sort of how did we react to that. So Tamanna like you saw rightly pointed out in your graphs this is precisely what happened the moment lockdown began sometime in late March and I think 24th of March is when the lockdown actually happened and even before that there was heightened sense of you know sensitivity regarding the risk of coronavirus infection. So people were getting quite justified the very apprehensive about getting exposed to the external environment and stepping out of home. So two things happened like your graph said out of home consumption dropped dramatically sharply and almost like instantly and in-home consumption went up. Now in-home consumption again is there two parts to it so ordering food in food delivery platforms now that wasn't an option in India in the early months of lockdown because a lot of services were not operational and then there were restrictions in movement. So self cooking home cooking was the only option and a lot of people who up till that point in time had no inclination towards cooking had no time for cooking well they had to fill in or did not have the skills or the knowledge they had to fill up that skill gap very quickly. Now between if you actually look at I think you were also looking at some of the online data here but if you look at Google Trends you will see between March and April there was a huge surge in this in key words like say cheese recipes and we were looking at the data we were all the marketing team were looking at the data real time and we saw this huge spike in people seeking information in home cooking how to prepare how to do simple basic you know cooking how to prepare specific dishes and most of our ingredient products for example cheese butter ghee paneer condensed milk that here we have such a huge basket of products so the demand for everything went up because people were staying at home they were cooking more and even if you look at the Instagram pics from that you know those months people were very eager to show off their newly acquired calories so they were making you know those masterpieces at home and they were taking these pics and showing off on Instagram and so on so yes we saw a big big increase sudden increase a sudden spike so to say in the demand for all consumer product categories in fact all the in-home you know products which could be consumed inside the home the demand for those went up not only for the products which are typically classified as ingredients to be used in the kitchen say butter cheese paneer ghee etc but also for a ready to eat and ready to cook categories we do frozen snacks we do methi we do chocolates so all that anything that could be consumed at home went up dramatically more more than that there was also the big hunger for information because people were getting into cooking and they wanted to brush up on their cooking skills and they wanted to fill up those skill gaps very rapidly so they wanted to know more about how to prepare specific recipes how to prepare that awesome dish that they would order from a restaurant look no longer they can you know they have to make it at home and they want to know how so what we did was we created what we call the world largest live cooking show and we use every live on the platform for hosting it this initiative started around i believe april 17 2020 it continues till today and it is going very strong today is the 201th day continuously we do more than seven sessions every day specific time bands we've brought in more than 3000 chefs from across the world we gave them a platform to showcase their skills their recipes and share their cooking skills with people who wanted to acquire that information and we've done what almost 1570 sessions in 201 days on that show itself we've got accumulated views of nearly a billion across 1570 sessions individual sessions some of some of them i mean the reviews range from anything from two lakhs to we did i guess a maximum of four point five million for one session and these are chefs from across the entire you know spectrum so i mean the chefs will also have a lot of spare time because restaurants were closed from say march to may june and then they were now gradually opening up so they also had a lot of spare time and they were able to come on to this platform and showcase their skills and share the knowledge of people so we had celebrity chefs we had profession chefs from every institution we had home chefs we had home cooking enthusiasts people who used to you know have those family recipes that they would treasure for generations and then wanted to share with the world so we gave all of them a platform and this is going on very strongly now we are doing thematic routes to it we are doing languages we have separate sessions in Tamil we have separate sessions in Arabic for the Middle East audience and we have we are doing now sessions in Bangla very soon so it's going on strong we I believe it's already gone into one of the record books one of the sessions had thousand chefs across multiple locations and all of them were collaborating and cooking together simultaneously on a single project so that particular event already went into the record books and very hopeful it's not happened yet but I think we are likely and I hope it happens get into the Guinness book as a world record for the longest running recipe or live cooking show in the entire world on digital online but that's not the only thing we did we also created our own content we I think we made around 550 recipe videos because people were hungry for you know information on cooking so 550 recipe videos in 11 Indian languages we wanted to expand our reach footprint across the entire country we hosted them on our youtube channel today that channel has around I think three and a half subscribers are to wish 25 to 30 percent were added during these last seven months so a lot of things we've done and not only in terms of being able to connect and communicate with people the most important thing that we had to do during this COVID times was also to be able to physically connect to a loyal customer base make sure when they were spending time at home when they had no option of leaving home and going or shopping we were still able to bring a mood products to their doorstep so that was very important to us wow this is amazing you know I was I was seeing a lot of recipe you know a lot of recipes right I was looking up on the website and but somehow I've you know I've not seen it in a lot of Facebook groups so I didn't know but this is amazing it's it's mind-blowing and you know I think it also helped like I think cooking is is therapeutic it is therapeutic for a lot of people right and for the people who never knew what it even meant like or felt like once they indulged or had to do it you know it just it's it's a very good it's the time when you know you bond with the family it feels good so I think also the fact that like a billion views is is mind-blowing right a billion views have only been heard of on like TikTok but this just shows right because people had so much time at hand in utilizing that time you know cooking and seeing recipes and if you know I'm all stepped up as a brand to provide that you know that's amazing I'll definitely check it out you said this is on your Facebook page yes it is okay and all of these were professional chefs so like I said there were the entire spectrum of chefs so we have celebrity chefs we even had chef Thomas who if you've heard of him he's the royal chef the king of Saudi so from that end of the spectrum to a lot of professional chefs who had time to spare fortunately during this entire COVID period and then there were a lot of home chefs too so people and people who wanted to share that specific you know the family recipe that had been treasured with their family for generations and they wanted to share it with the world so we I remember one of the most popular sessions was by a lady from Rajasthan who shared her recipe for dal bhati and the kind of views she got and the responses that we were getting when she was live I mean that was kind of phenomenal very encouraging and the people who come on again and again we have as many a session seven sessions a day and these are on very specific time bands and they happen from across the entire world largely India but then we have also chefs who join us from different countries very exciting I'm sure Adith you know we'll have things later so I'll come back I'll come back by one with you know a couple of more questions but Vincent ice cream is something we all love we continue to love and so for me lockdown was the time when I first time ever created ice cream at home right just and again it was more craving than anything else and for for my son so I created an almond milk ice cream without an ice cream maker so it's interesting we were looking at some polls right that Adith did in his community also and about 45 percent people said that they've started making ice cream at home right and this was a recent poll where 55 percent the rest of the people said they continue to like get it from outside or you know order in but 45 percent said they make it at home and and and the other sort of so that's one trend there right like how have you seen the impact the other the other interesting thing is this whole health consciousness right it's all so immunity is very important right having overall healthy foods which means more awareness around ingredients and you know lesser sugar has just it's just become like you know people have linked it all together that overall if I stay healthy if I stay fit then that will lead to a higher immunity right so how have you seen the impact of all of you know both of these trends like making ice cream at home and sort of more healthy less sugar okay so yeah both the questions are interesting with the first one is a little bit scarier for the category category we operate or a brand that we run making ice creams at home means shutting down which we do not want so definitely during during March to June when the peak was too high we suffered a lot because those are the four months where ice cream sells the most it's summertime and that was the exact time when markets were shut dealers were shut we couldn't we couldn't perform anything factories were also almost shut the production was down to five percent what the trend that we saw is while you saw while the thing that you said is absolutely correct people try making ice cream right people looking for recipes online however the challenge of making ice creams in home versus the ice creams manufactured in a factory are completely different while you can make most of your loved foods or loved recipes at home it's very difficult to replicate a cheese making process an ice cream making process at home okay so the paneer that you get probably we make paneer at home but the paneer that you get from among the the soft paneer it's completely a different feel that you have so yes we we saw that trend however the trend has changed and for the good we have we have come back to normalcy at least in terms of dining out as as you mentioned the 45 percent levels in all the metro cities where we used to sell online the food aggregators all through our own platforms we've reached that mark again so so one thing is that the people have started coming back to ice creams as a category which was a little bit that difficult to make at replicated at home second not just replicating it but also preserving it for a longer period of time that's another challenge when it comes to a category like ice creams so the the texture has to remain you cannot there cannot be ice crystals forming in your ice cream otherwise you get frozen bites so these are some critical product features which prohibit a person to make the category of the product at home the second thing which you asked is about the immunity yes again during during covid the first thing that cropped up for everybody was will eating something cold make me immune or lower my immunity to covid that was the question on everybody's mind so the ice cream ic mar or the ice cream group they also came out with a release or with a press release that eating ice creams doesn't lower your immunity or doesn't make you susceptible to corona virus so that was clear evidence however we saw brands we saw brands coming up with healthy ice cream honey ice cream okay now we as a brand have more as a brand we always believe that ice creams for example the way you said you made an ice cream out of for the joy for your son okay that is what ice creams bring to our life it doesn't bring immunity doesn't bring health if you want health there is there are healthy foods if you want immunity there are medicines but ice cream is something different we do not want to tamper with that feeling of an ice cream and we stayed consciously we stayed away from that immunity ice cream but because it's it's just there for a few days or for a few months it's not gonna last the only immunity yes people find ice creams very sweet so probably sugar free or low calorie could be the next gen ice cream that people will be waiting for and yes there are some inroads happening there are there are many private brands private labels who are into the low calorie ice creams so yes that there could be a way for low calorie or sugar free ice creams going forward but immunity boosters probably not at least not have more I think that's a very sensible you're right right like I don't know if I would buy a healthy ice cream maybe we can do a poll to find out if I may add so we were one of those who did launch healthy ice cream and we have we have a healthy ice cream which is doing extremely well so the first reaction was healthy and ice cream will the two meet because like our friend said ice cream is about taste and indulgence right it's about the joy of eating but the first scoop the first spoonful that people take from a healthy ice cream and say wow healthy ice cream with immunity and can it taste so good so that's what we aim to do you know build an immunity into a product that people already like and then make it so so the taste so awesome that they love the taste and come back for the taste of it and immunity comes as an add on benefit so ice cream is not the only one in which we did the immunity range we did a lot of milk beverages so we've got to see do ginger do with ashwagandha do then so many things with an entire range of milk beverages which were immunity you know based on the immunity platform a lot of our campaigns were on immunity we position in fact milk itself the basic the most basic product that we market that itself is something which enhances human immunity and we had a big campaign during this covid times repositioning milk as an immunity booster immunity enhancer for the human body so yes immunity is something that we worked on and in terms of product innovation in terms of putting in new products in the market a lot and a lot of immunity products that we came out with if you check our facebook page right now we are having a big facebook campaign on one of our latest immunity introductions innovations and ice cream again we call it immunity chakra and it's got three immunity ingredients in it so it's something that i'm sure a few i mean people will people have taken to it and immunity to in our mind really works in food products and people are looking out for immunity boosters especially the ones that also taste good yeah so i think i mean you know yeah both points of view are right ice cream is like i would i would love to have chocolate ice cream because i always love chocolate ice cream but yeah given a choice you know maybe someone would say let me try that healthy ice cream now whether healthy in that form leads to immunity of course the ingredients benefits are proven but in that cold form does healthy lead to immunity is something that you know it's i mean it's not tangible right it is debatable but i understand and it's it's truly completely sort of affected our choices i actually since you mentioned this i have i have one question you know before adit i come to you that you know for these new products i did see that you know amul has launched a whole range of new products right given that this was pretty much post sort of lockdown right given that there was no consumer research happening in person clearly people are not going out were there any efforts done in terms of understanding you know insights or sort of looking at conversations because every single brand right so the last webinar we did was on personal hygiene and there's 300 new brands come up with uh you know sanitizers and believe it or not like some of the market leaders right their share has gone the share of voice has reduced because because of non-availability people you know just started buying lot of new brands so uh every brand pretty much has launched some form of a immunity product uh you know even in the food space uh but what to launch and you know how to even create so again out of 100 healthy products which ones do i choose that are most effective right so educating consumers but also first finding out that word because we you know clearly like there was a spike in like the card are the concoctions uh you know doing those things at home but just wanted to understand so where are you tapping into insights and where are you educating so recipes is of course a great way of education but uh for these new products how is that education happening so is the question on how do we conceptualize and generate ideas when you products and bring it into you know bring them to the market or is about post launch and then educating the consumers about them but let me answer let me answer the spirit of spirit of what you uh what you wanted to ask yes in terms of innovation and how we do it and how we do it even during the covid times believe me new product innovation is into our is in our DNA is deeply ingrained in the DNA of our mold so even prior to covid we were doing at an average we have something called a new product introduction index we call it npi index and our npi index was more than two new products every month so in 48 months we had done an average of more than two new product introductions every month from our mold that's the kind of new product introduction rate we have so we obviously have a well structured system that scans the environment that continuously interacts with end users generates ideas from different sources evaluates those ideas you know test out the viability of those ideas in the field in the market and through a process of iterative you know product evaluation and a series of gaze and filters we are able to zero down on those products at peak that will actually work a mool works on the concept of what we call umbrella branding so you got one brand and a host of products under the grant we are very careful when we evaluate a product in terms of its viability and in terms of consumer response it is likely to elicit so when you bring something to the market it goes through very rigorous field test consumer evaluation test and we are very confident only when we are very confident it becomes in a mool product right so those systems helped us even during the covid times and well we had different ways since obviously field researchers etc were limited in the initial days of the lockdown especially in the first three months we had our own way of testing out products we also use common sense a lot so well if there is you know there's a desire for immunity based food products obviously healthy do the something that has been in India for generations it does not really require a you know a great stretch of imagination to know that healthy do it could be launched or for that matter tulsi do ginger do because those are something which are intuitively things that Indians understand as immunity boosters we just had to make sure that the products when they come to the market taste good and in food product when the the moment you take the first sip of the first bite it has to you know have you hooked so that is that is what we aim to do right very interesting the NPI index I'm learning a lot of new things today so I did I did just you know I've I've known I did since a few months now you know we I met him the first time when we did a user interview with him because he had installed convo site was using it for his facebook group and was very inspiring to listen to his journey because he's now a full-time community leader and runs one of the most popular food communities in Delhi I did help us understand you know one is your journey of course you know it's very inspirational but who are these people who are a part of the community and there's so many channels online right where we can get they can go and get information on food on recipes there's there's brands there's celebrities right who are posting online why would why would they come to a facebook group and and talk like who and who are these people are they primarily chefs are the individuals sure so thanks for your kind words first so I'm I'm glad you found my journey inspirational and I'm really pleased to hear that and hello to everybody so when I started this facebook community this was way back in 2015 and at that time I felt there's a vacuum and there's a need of having a close-knit community of food lovers and anybody who is associated with food in any manner can happily come and engage and I'm pleased to see over the years that's exactly what's happened so to answer your question all kinds of people who are in some way associated to food be it their a passionate food lover or their business revolves around food or their food professionals or their top bloggers of food anybody who is associated with food is welcome to be a part of deli foodies and is having a great time so those are the kind of people who are there in my community and to answer the second part of your question brands would have a great time because I was listening to some of the insights shared by both these team panelists there see when I come to ice creams I'll say I'm more of a purist so when something like a healthy ice cream is mentioned my eyes go up and it's so I think the brands need to come into the communities and listen to what the actual pulse of the nation is saying so we would gladly I may be wrong I'm saying I speak for myself where the community could prove me wrong because it's an open democratic community but I feel you know as a person as a foodie I do give into my indulgences all the time and so I try to strike a balance especially during these times where health is the most important thing so I always try to have a nice diet on the weekdays and on the weekends I cheat so ice cream is a part of my cheat so so so on my cheat day I would rather have a pure casata or a hot chocolate fudge or my favorite the flavor is blackcurrant rather than go for a healthy ice cream so so the brands would be more than welcome to before launching their product come into some of our communities and check like you I'm sure do a lot of research your own ways of finding out will this product actually work so have a sample and maybe come on board and so this is what communities offer this is what we offer brands can come on board maybe a restaurant who wants to start a new innovative fusion cuisine because a lot of time you know we keep hearing tandoori momos doing really well now but a lot of purists say we don't like tandoori momos we love the traditional steamed and fried momos so before launching it actually come on board and test test and get those insights and they will help them so that's where I think communities offer a lot to brands, restaurants, recipe creators all of them anybody who's associated with food because this is where foodies are. So Adith tell me a little bit more like when I was you know chatting with you yesterday and asking you about post-COVID right what all happened and there's a few themes that you spoke about which were very interesting that especially the semi-cooked and DIY right like how from the initial knee jerk to just cooking at home to now being fatigued from cooking at home in this trend of so tell us a little bit more that what happened post-COVID just in terms of conversations where did this shift immediately and where are they now? So Tamanna you know as I mentioned yesterday I'll mention it again today for everybody to hear you know COVID has been around for a long time now it's not something new now but if you go back when it came back earlier so people were really shocked and people were scared so the behavior and the conversations in the community revolved around what they were feeling they were scared eating out dining out was not an option at that time lockdown was imposed people are locked up inside they wanted to use food to boost up their immunity be at the peak of their game peak of their health that's what they wanted to do initially and they couldn't just go to a swiggy or a tomato and order in maybe a lot of people choose healthy eating out options also but that was not an option so dining out became dining in focus was more on people cooking in the initial days and everybody wanted those as you mentioned immunity boosting kadas well a lot of people started coming up with immunity boosting ladoos and those posts went viral on our communities that started happening so later on what happened was and I for one I'm a passionate cooking and I also find cooking therapeutic but I don't do it regularly I also started doing it more often I we with my wife's help we made an excellent butter chicken which was one of the best tasting butter chickens we had so we did that initially we all were excited later on when the unlockdown started happening dining out and ordering out more precisely became an option again and as you said fatigue started setting in we got tired of our newfound energy we had coffee cooking over a lot of cooking has happened so again dining out became an option people started venturing out and at that same time some of them who are not very adventurous they didn't want to go out but they wanted to order in with the newfound research which is coming in like eating out and ordering from outside is fairly safe if a number of protocols are met and brands also began to assure the end consumers like all the hygiene practices all the safety protocols are being met so go ahead and order from us so people started doing it and during this time brands and restaurants also added a new product to their inventory which is do-it-yourself meal kits which is I'll take an example of in my dad days also I have a lot of proteins so I have to cook my proteins on my own so they came up with marinated chicken marinated paneer pre-marinated which is semi-cooked they do everything but in the end the end finishing I do it in my oven or my fryer so it's done in my own in front of my own eyes so and I really liked it and now that a lot of options are still available I still find I'm still buying those do-it-yourself the products and I'm using them so things are changing as with covid people earlier were scared and on the the conversations were reflecting on that later on people are now learning to live with covid and that same change is being reflected in the conversations also earlier there was a place for everybody wanted to say in the post we have all kinds of posts on our community so people used to share their breakfast posts and you used to mention in the initial days of covid oh I start my day now with tulsi drops so that those conversations were really peaking people wanted to say that look we are doing a lot of healthy stuff in our diet now and now later on you see a lot of normalcy return a lot of people are in fact sharing giving in to those cravings sharing having street food making street food at home ordering street food has started and people are doing it so the conversations are changing people are learning to as the lockdown is happening as with the outside society something similar is happening inside the community also and how does how do the members react when a brand so I believe you've you've been doing brand campaigns right even even from before but how do the members react you know when brands come and want to talk to them or any insights can you take some examples sure so you know I've always advocated this to the brands also because being a community entrepreneur myself and I'm an ex media sales guy myself so I've been on both sides so so what I advocate to the brands is the messaging or the conversations when you engage with the community members should be subtle and indirect and not more in in your face you can't just have a know like what you do and say a newspaper you can't have that same creative in a community you need to have the conversations tweak in a way that the members feel the brand is offering something valuable to them be it a contest be it a nice giveaway be it some insights about why consumers should choose their brand I'll take an example of a fairly new brand which is a food delivery guy primarily focusing on non-veg products good to go so during COVID a lot of people started to stop ordering non-veg foods because there was a lot of gray area about is non-veg safe to order from outside or not so their sales suffered and at that time they seek to help the founder of that company called me up and they said let me educate the members about the safety precautions we are doing so in that creative they showed the rider fully masked and they showed that they are also taking care of all the safety precautions and the product which we are delivering to you is absolutely safe to consume and that work that work a lot of people said yes we did order after seeing this creative and we really love the quality of stuff which this guy is giving so this is where communities can really help brands and brands can also tweak their messaging like right now in Diwali you can have a Diwali specific messaging from the brand you can simply wish Diwali to the members and have a Diwali centric recipe contest we've got two of those going on live right now as we talk so a lot of this can be done a lot of this being done so a lot to offer or so a lot of recipe contests yeah this community has a lot of recipe contests there's I think one going on with Ashur Vadaata one going on with some yeah okay that's I wanted to come back to Pawan and Vincent and ask about this whole semi cooked or the DIY it's I think what it's doing is and what we're seeing in conversation it kind of brings together this feeling of doing it yourself so it's still that satisfaction while you know reducing the time right and so are there any innovations and I know it's you know very difficult for ice cream or maybe it is not maybe we just need to think a little bit more but what's the thought there like is that a trend that you know especially like sort of the newer generation is that something they'll adopt because it's a habit that's also become right not that I'll go and make ice cream every single time but you know there's certain things have become a part of the habit so what what is the thought around that any kind of research there or newer products okay you should I go first in this or Vincent you want to take this no you can probably okay all right so what you know our core competence is food products and specifically milk and dairy products and a lot of these products go into the kitchen as ingredients in food preparation right and then we have a lot of ready to eat products as well which say beverages chocolates and mithai and so on so what we have been doing over the in recent years is moving up the value chain moving up the value ladder and converting our ingredient products into ready to cook or ready to eat products so for example we have cheese amul cheese so out of that we make amul cheese popcorn so amul cheese parathas amul cheese onion parathas we more precise and then these come in frozen forms and consumers simply have to take them home if they want they can just just heat them up and cook them on a tawa so it's ready to cook basically or they can do a lot of their own creativity to it so you can do garnishing you can add some more of your own ideas to it and make it even bigger and better for example we've had a protocol frozen pizzas for years so frozen pizzas again we sell pizza cheese the mozzarella cheese and then we came out with a frozen pizzas so these frozen pizzas people buy them and then they do their own garnishing they do their own toppings of course pizza is all about toppings and crust right so once they have a frozen pizza which already is you know pre-garnish but they can do a lot of creativity on it and do the pizzas as for their own customize it as for their own taste and just to delight their own family even kids so we do that moving up the value ladder is a conscious step that we've taken we have dahi so what we do is make dahi tikis and these are again a range of frozen dahi tikis that we market and people take them home now of course you can have dahi tikis as it is just put them in your you know you just cook them and they're ready to eat or you can then use your creative creativity and do a lot of garnishing you can do some value act to it you can add your own creative inputs and you know delight your families so a lot of things like these we are doing paneer so we make paneer nuggets so again cheese we got cheese popcorns and cheese you know so a whole range of value adds products which are now either ready to cook or products which can be you know taken home and well users can do their own creative inputs on it and do their own value add and serve it to their families or just have it at home and enjoy that's what we do it's very interesting so mostly frozen foods which we can bring home and fry and you know I'm sure in like next month's out of the two new products one might be like do it yourself like even non-frozen right there can be innovation there where absolutely absolutely so that can also be done so you can have a whole kit of things and then but of course we do those combos so example on many of these e-commerce sites we there are combos which happen so a condensed milk which goes by the brand Amul Mitai made which is you know condensed sweetened condensed milk so that and in the carrot season so there's a combo which happens with carrots and this and then of course we have our own recipe that people can take and make gajar ka halwa at home or for that matter you know paneer and frozen peas so frozen peas and paneer a lot of e-commerce sites they do a lot of bundling and then their recipes of making mutton paneer at home so those kind of things do happen even today very interesting okay um i wouldn't press oh and i do you have any other questions otherwise we have some questions for vince into uh i think he was gonna yeah i'll be quick on this yeah so in specific to the what's specific to the ice cream category okay the challenge with diy is the last mile connectivity okay uh you need ice creams to be in their form by the time it reaches home you either pick them up from a modern store or you you you order them online by the time it reaches home it's almost ready to eat okay you can't store it again and you can't make a recipe out of it so that that's one challenge uh is the infrastructure for a frozen product which has to be frozen in nature during consumption that's a big challenge for us so as a brand yes we've taken some learnings during the covid times and we've come up with certain packaging again the packaging is not very environment friendly it is still in thermocol boxes but it gives longevity to the product it improves the shelf life for a product for a consumer to have an ice cream and do it by themselves if they want to convert an ice cream into a sundae into a kasata or into some other form which they want at home so this is something that we've innovated recently just with packaging and not with the product policy so uh so that is how we are helping people are helping our consumers to get their DIY kit at home right right very interesting okay so you know our conversation on butter chicken and kasatas can go on forever but since we have a timeline to stick to we can always take this conversation offline after the session's over so thank you so much speakers for this amazing chat that we've had and uh our presenting partners conversation I just have some quick questions from the audiences to each of our speakers uh we'll start with you Damanna uh so uh question says that do you think us ours or restaurants should now also have a community budget understand changes and preferences and consumer behavior as it is it is impossible to speak uh with the customer inside a restaurant no one is entering and people who are coming want to leave immediately yeah your thoughts Damanna yeah so I think uh again from an insights perspective uh you know the reason we started doing this uh you know once we had our own communities we were very fascinated with the depth in conversations right and that's where we we built category specific models to understand I mean end of the day it's what people are talking how do we meaningfully get an insight out of it and take an action so uh yeah whether it's restaurants or like some of the charts that I you know showed you it's all from conversations it's like people talking if somebody was to do a model of this webinar and say that you know these are the top themes I'm sure what will come out is DIY and that's really the power of aggregating millions of conversations and getting to the right insights and there's insights you get on open social media platforms as well because people are commenting on pages and instagram etc but it's still not a two-way communication channel but two-way communication channel is where people are conversing where it's a trusted forum or a community and facebook groups just because of the scale so just two weeks back facebook groups came up uh there was a global community summit in which uh you know the number now of people that interact meaningfully in communities just groups every month is 1.8 billion so what's contributing to pretty much all the engagement on facebook is groups right it's not a pages and that's because you and I have changed today right we seek authentic conversations and that's where we sort of get to do so yeah I mean you know restaurants and definitely should uh uh get insights from conversations absolutely thanks I see a comment here and it says I really like the cakes that have more has come up with wins and that's for you I just see that comment in the chat with a smiley so I'm getting hungrier now and I have to fast today so I'm about to say that yeah we have lots and lots of questions coming in from the audiences I would once again want to remind that all these conversations will be live on our social media handles you can take it ahead there so really over to you Pavan the question here says that Amul has always understood the pulse of the Indian community via the Amul girl cartoon and always kind of depicted in its truest sense how do you get these strong consumer insights from the entire Indian community at large so of course uh that's in our DNA we have learned to be consumer focus and we keep our finger on the pulse of you know the people who matter most the end users so that's that's we've always done and we perfected the art over the decades and that's what Amul is all about Amul is all about being able to anticipate things that are happening in society even before they happen and be in sync for the times and stay in fact try and stay ahead a couple of steps ahead of the times so that's what we do and we keep in sync and we keep in touch with the people who matter most to us our loyal consumers right right thanks so much Pavan um the next question goes for Vincent it says ice cream joints and metro seem to be famous and almost unbranded companies are becoming the brand in the ice cream industry has community marketing played a role in changing this and how has have more tried to work on the brand any example that you'd want to share uh okay uh as a brand as have more we operate into both the categories one is the retail segment and the other is the ice cream parlours to which the question is very specific okay uh yes ice creams are or were more regional in nature until infrastructure was built a cold frozen supply chain was built and and and as a product it's growing because the per capita consumption uh in india is still 350 ml that's a per capita consumption so there is a lot a lot of headroom for ice cream as a category to grow so hence you and and and the mechanics or or the science behind making an ice cream there is there's no rocket science okay so that you you can make ice creams uh in a very small factory all you need is a good deep freezer to connect it at a retail store and sell it from there the real challenge lies in the distribution part and that is why you see small small small outlets or independent outlets in different parts of the cities coming up cropping up and establishing themselves absolutely in terms of community messaging has that worked yes online food or online aggregators pure advocacy or network advocacy has has helped develop this entire online gaming or this online food business i would say and and that is where these smaller brands or these independent individual private labels are making a lot of money from we said uh talking of you know communication and messaging there's a small addition to your question that says that how is have more using digital to persuade more people to have more ice cream not that it requires a lot of persuasion but still okay so so there are there are two hidden questions in here one is uh communicating ice creams outside of summer okay where where the need for a consumer is not very evident but for us as a brand it's very evident we have to make sales we have to grow so how do we communicate to them that's one point and the second is how do we reach to them through the online platform and through the offline platform right so the way we have we've targeted uh this communication is we've picked up geographies for example the the moment we came out of covid it was monsoons and then we entered into the beginning of winter okay which is again a lean period for ice creams but we picked up geographies like gujarat rajasthan where neither monsoons are strong and also winter arrives somewhere in december january so we upped our marketing spends in these geographies and we went online so right now for example we have a series called has more passport with a local select in gujarat mallard and we are taking regional marketing as the route to go out and meet to consumers talk to them about our product the different kind of things that we have that's one how we communicate and on the second line of how we ensure our products go there to the consumer online we've launched a new range of ice creams called hash more to go okay now by the name itself it's hash it means it's online more to go it's on the go for you it's it's an exclusive range of ice creams only meant to be sold online so again we are catering to the consumer getting them connected hooked on to online and we've made a product available online to these consumers so we are piloting this in and the right now where our ho is and then we plan to take it to the rest of India awesome I get the next question is to you the question goes like have you done campaigns in your community with only large food brands or restaurants are also interested to actively participate in your community so to be honest restaurants are actively doing a lot of stuff in some of the other communities and I'll be honest to say that I've not been very actively in in touch with the restaurant owners but it's starting to happen now more so in covid they do there's a lot of room for restaurant owners to come and gain valuable insights for them but being an ex media guy myself my initial conversations happened with brands bigger and smaller so I've been guilty of not reaching out to restaurants through strike conversations earlier but yes a lot of indirect conversations around restaurants automatically are happening in communities because pre covid a lot of people were dining out and they used to have organic reviews of those places so those conversations were happening but yes there is a lot of scope now with the hospitality industry really hit and communities can really offer a lot by reaching out to the audience and tell them like look at the best practices which the restaurants are now offering so lots of scope which can be done a lot of communities are doing it we are not very active in it we're not very active in it but it can be done right okay we have some more questions live from the audience somebody called Sneha Kulkarni is asking what's the link on fb Sneha you can log into any of our social handles and you'll find all our speakers there you'll find the conversation live there the next question because this question was asked at 542 so I think it was funny was talking about the live cooking I don't know if you have the link you could put it in the chat or just I mean just see Amul facebook page so it's very easy to find and you can it's already got one I guess two million fans right now so I guess if you just like that page you will automatically get the notification whenever that specific recipe show is live and we have as many as seven sessions in a day so it goes live at different times and the last one is at 11 p.m in the night so every night and then you will just go ahead and like the Facebook page and you'll get those notifications every time there's a show which is live right great so we are running short of time so we want to quickly wrap up the session I would once again want to thank all our speakers here of course our presenting partner conversation thank you to each one of you for making this conversation interesting and almost delectable you know we can take this conversation offline like I mentioned on our social handles thank you so much for joining us this evening thanks all right thank you thank you thank you thank you