We are experimenting with performance marketing: MTR Foods’ Anupam Nair

Few Indian FMCG brands can claim a legacy spanning over a century. MTR Foods, which traces its origins back to 1924 as a restaurant business, Mavalli Tiffin Room in Bengaluru, is one of those rare exceptions. Over the decades, the brand has transformed itself from a local food institution into one of India's most trusted packaged food companies, with a portfolio spanning spices, masalas, breakfast mixes, ready-to-eat meals, sweets, vermicelli, milk mixes, and more.

Yet, longevity alone does not guarantee relevance. As consumer habits evolve and newer brands emerge across categories, MTR faces the challenge of balancing its heritage with the demands of a new generation of consumers.

Speaking about the company's growth drivers and evolving consumer strategy, Anupam Nair, Chief Marketing and Growth Officer, MTR Foods (part of Orkla India) said the company's strength lies in understanding the distinct role each category plays across geographies.

Regional Strengths Continue to Power Growth

According to Nair, MTR's spices and masala portfolio continue to be a major growth engine, particularly in its stronghold markets of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. The company offers a wide range of regional blends including sambar powder, rasam powder, puliyogare mix, bisibele bath powder, and vangi bath masala, products that have deep cultural relevance in southern India with Nair calling this category as the “real heavy lifters.”

Beyond spices, breakfast mixes remain one of the company's big plays with the northern markets, showing some of the strongest demand for breakfast mixes. MTR Foods is widely credited with creating the packaged rava idli category, a product that has since found acceptance well beyond South India. The sweets category is another significant contributor to the business. Products such as Gulab Jamun Mix continue to enjoy strong consumer affinity, particularly during festive seasons. The company has also expanded into ready-to-eat sweets, with products like Mysore Pak finding traction not only across India but also among international consumers seeking authentic Indian flavours. "Depending on the category and geography, we have power brands all across the categories,” Nair noted.

The 102-Year-Old Brand’s Journey of Building Trust

In an era where consumers are constantly exposed to new products and brands, MTR's biggest asset may well be its legacy and the trust built over MTR's 102-year journey. “No brand can survive for over a century unless consumers genuinely love it and we continue to work upon building consumer love.”

While heritage provides credibility, brands must continue to evolve if they are to remain relevant to changing consumer needs. MTR's approach has been to retain the essence of traditional foods while making them more accessible and convenient for modern lifestyles to continue resonating with consumers. The company cites the evolution of the idli category as a prime example. What began with packaged idli breakfast mixes and has now expanded into ready-to-use idli and dosa batters, in Bangalore and Hyderabad, allowing consumers to prepare traditional foods with significantly less effort. This philosophy of evolving alongside consumer needs has become central to MTR's innovation for its portfolio strategy.

Winning Over Gen Z Through Convenience

One of the biggest shifts in food consumption today is the growing importance of convenience, particularly among younger consumers. Gen Z consumers, who often skip breakfast due to paucity of time, present both a challenge and an opportunity for food brands. MTR's answer to this trend has been its "3-Minute Breakfast" portfolio, which includes products such as poha and vegetable upma that combine convenience with familiar flavours and can be prepared simply by adding hot water. He says, “These products allow us to find the rightful place in consumers’ pantry and helps us build relevance along with the legacy that we already enjoy.”

When it comes to communication, Nair believes the proposition is self-explanatory. "The brand name, "3-Minute Breakfast", itself communicates the benefit. When consumers see MTR 3-Minute Breakfast, they immediately understand that breakfast can be ready in three minutes," he said. He adds that consumer acceptance of products such as poha and upma has validated the category's potential.

The Shift Towards Digital Media

The company's communication strategy for the 3-Minute Breakfast range reflects the changing media habits of younger audiences with MTR adopting a predominantly digital-first strategy for this portfolio. As a result, marketing investments behind the range are focused almost entirely on digital channels.

However, MTR's strategy extends beyond digital advertising. Recognizing that younger consumers value experiences as much as products. The brand has increasingly invested in experiential marketing initiatives. Partnerships with events such as Comic-Con have enabled MTR to engage consumers in environments where they are already spending time, helping the brand build stronger emotional connections. For Nair, the combination of a clear proposition, digital-led communication, and experiential engagement has become a powerful formula for driving relevance among younger audiences.

MTR's evolving marketing strategy mirrors broader shifts in consumer media consumption. According to Nair, digital media today accounts for nearly 40% of Orkla India's communication spend, a significant increase from the relatively small share it commanded six or seven years ago, with the allocation varying by category.

For newer, youth-focused brands such as 3-Minute Breakfast, marketing investments are almost entirely digital. For established categories such as spices and masalas, television continues to play an important role, particularly in core southern markets where the objective is to penetrate deeper down the pop strata. Nair states that while TV remains the lead medium, digital provides incremental reach with the TG being homemakers who are likely to look for recipes online.

Nair states, “Along with performance marketing, it is critical that we build our digital presence strongly, and we made sure to make change as we evolve.” The growing importance of e-commerce and quick commerce has further accelerated this transition, making digital visibility increasingly important not just for brand building but also for driving purchase decisions.

Expanding Beyond Metros

Historically, categories such as breakfast mixes were driven primarily by urban consumers in metros and large cities. That dynamic is now changing. The rapid expansion of e-commerce and quick-commerce platforms has enabled brands like MTR to reach consumers in smaller towns that were previously difficult to access through traditional retail networks.

Nair explains, “Quick commerce and e-commerce has helped deepen reach, particularly for our breakfast portfolio, and allows us to reach consumers far more easily and frequently. We have to build on that by increasing awareness, get new consumers to try our products, and then work on making it a habit. In tandem with the reach of these platforms, we've been able to build these categories further, going beyond metrics.”

Nair noted that general trade still remains the largest contributor to sales, but digital commerce has grown rapidly. Today, 8–9% of Orkla India’s sales come from digital channels, compared with roughly 1–2% about five or six years ago. Given the overall scale of the business, he described that share as “significant.”

Omnichannel, one message

As consumers move fluidly between kirana stores, supermarkets and quick commerce apps, maintaining consistency has become a major marketing challenge across the industry. MTR’s approach is to keep the core proposition identical across channels, even if the creative format changes. A 30-second television commercial may be adapted into a 6-second quick commerce video, but the promise remains the same. “The consumer is the same person. You cannot communicate two different propositions on two different platforms,” Nair said.

The company’s experimentation with performance marketing has also produced some clear creative learnings. Nair says, “We are experimenting with performance marketing. What we've done, along with our agency partners, whether it is creative or media, is to learn our way through it, and then build it at scale as we apply it to the other categories.”

A big learning is: attention spans are dramatically shorter than they were in traditional television advertising. He says, “You need to make sure your brand is introduced within the first two to three seconds so that it enters into the consumers’ head. This is something that we try and build into our creatives.”

The second major learning is the need to break clutter quickly. “There is almost no moment when consumers are giving a single screen their full attention anymore. The need to break clutter and get your message across is even more important than before.” he said.

India's food diversity makes national leadership difficult

Unlike categories such as soaps or detergents, food continues to remain deeply regional in India. Taste preferences change every few hundred kilometres, making it difficult for any single brand to dominate the spices category nationwide. Nair believes this diversity is precisely why India has multiple regional market leaders rather than one dominant national player.

Using sambar as an example, he explained that recipes differ not only across states such as Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh, but even within Karnataka itself. The sambar served in Bengaluru and Mysuru is markedly different from that prepared in coastal regions like Mangaluru and Udupi. The differences go beyond recipes to the very ingredients used. For instance, Karnataka's famous Byadgi chilli imparts a deep red colour with relatively mild heat, while Andhra Pradesh's Guntur chilli delivers far greater pungency with less colour. These regional ingredients have shaped local cuisines over generations and continue to influence consumer preferences today. Nair states, “The reason no brand has been able to build a national-scale brand in this category is because we grow up eating a particular taste. That taste becomes a part of who we are," he said.

Taking South Indian cuisine national

Rather than trying to create a uniform national taste, MTR's strategy is to make authentic South Indian cuisine more accessible to consumers across India. Products such as sambar powder, rasam mixes, idli mixes and dosa mixes have already found acceptance well beyond the company's traditional southern markets. Nair believes consumers across India increasingly appreciate authentic regional cuisines but often lack the expertise or time to prepare them from scratch.

Although MTR remains synonymous with South Indian cuisine, its product portfolio has expanded significantly over the years. The company today offers a range of ready-to-eat North Indian meals including chana masala, paneer butter masala and rajma rice under its Minute Meals portfolio. Nair clarified that these products are not an attempt to move away from MTR's South Indian identity. Instead, they cater to changing consumer lifestyles and increasing mobility.

"When consumers travel, they come back wanting to eat the food they enjoyed elsewhere, but they may not know how to cook it," he explained. This creates an opportunity for MTR to democratise regional Indian cuisine by making it accessible through convenient packaged formats.

AI is becoming an everyday marketing tool

Like most marketers today, MTR is actively integrating artificial intelligence into multiple aspects of its marketing operations. While AI-generated content creation has become one of the most visible applications, Nair believes the technology's biggest impact lies elsewhere—in improving the speed and quality of decision-making. According to him, AI has significantly reduced the time required to create marketing assets, allowing teams to produce more creative variations and respond to market opportunities much faster. "It allows us to hit the market much faster with a lot more content," he said.

One of AI's biggest advantages for MTR has been in consumer research. Instead of relying solely on written concepts or verbal explanations during research sessions, marketers can now generate highly realistic visual representations of advertisements, packaging concepts or communication ideas before conducting consumer testing. This enables respondents to react to concepts that closely resemble the final execution, resulting in more meaningful feedback. Earlier, developing such visual prototypes required significant production time and cost. Today, marketers can generate multiple creative options within minutes.

Premiumisation is becoming a strategic priority

Innovation has long been part of MTR's identity. Nair says that the company pioneered packaged rava idli mixes decades ago and more recently introduced the 3-Minute Breakfast range aimed at busy urban consumers. Looking ahead, Nair said maintaining this innovation pipeline remains one of the company's biggest priorities.

Alongside convenience, MTR is also witnessing growing consumer demand for authenticity, traceability and premium ingredients. Responding to this trend, the company has introduced MTR Prakriti, a premium spices portfolio featuring single-origin ingredients sourced directly from specific regions. The range includes products such as Byadgi chilli, Guntur chilli, Araku turmeric and Kumaraj coriander, each sourced from its region of origin. Unlike conventional blended spices, these products are positioned around provenance, authenticity and small-batch production.

Even as MTR invests in premium products and new categories, it remains committed to strengthening its core spices business in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. One of the company's long-term objectives is to accelerate the shift from loose, unbranded spices to packaged branded products. The company is also continuing to deepen its rural distribution, reaching villages with populations as small as 3,000.

For Nair, the future of MTR rests on balancing two priorities: protecting its leadership in traditional markets while continually innovating for consumers whose expectations are evolving faster than ever before. "Our task is to continue growing our core while innovating for the discerning consumers of India," he said.