With an eye on the rapidly growing e-commerce market in India, 
MTR Foods is building its own online store.
Company CEO Sanjay Sharma said that an investment of around Rs 50 lakh is being made in the initiative. The store is expected to open by the third quarter of this year.
The decision, Sharma said, was motivated by the wide portfolio of MTR’s products. “We have around 300 products and at least a third of them are available in most retail stores. We feel it is time to unlock their potential,” he added.
The company’s ‘Namma MTR’ stores will be used as stocking locations from which the online orders will be serviced. “A third-party vendor has been roped in to build the e-commerce portal,” Sharma said.
The online initiative will be tested out in Bengaluru first and then expanded to other metros and tier-II cities. Sharma said the company aims to generate 10% of its revenue from sales online.
MTR now sells on online platforms such as BigBasket.com and Amazon. Sharma said the tie-up with BigBasket.com yields monthly orders worth Rs 8-10 lakh.
Norwegian conglomerate Orkla acquired homegrown MTR Foods in early 2007 for $80 million (Rs 350 crore then). Sharma said new initiatives by the company, such as increasing the brand’s visibility, helped to more than treble the company’s turnover – from Rs 160 crore at the time of acquisition in 2006-07, to nearly Rs 600 crore in 2014-15. Orkla has, over the years, invested nearly Rs 150 crore in MTR for its expansion, said Sharma.
MTR’s products are available in nearly 180,000 stores across India, said Sharma. But 110,000 of those stores are in Karnataka, showing that the brand is still very dependent on the state.
MTR Foods was founded by Bengaluru entrepreneur Sadananda Maiya, who, five years after selling the venture to Orkla, established another initiative called Maiya’s Beverages and Food that sells traditional snacks, juices, spices, meal mixes, and frozen foods.
Orkla is a leading supplier of branded consumer goods and concept solutions to the grocery sector, out-of-home sector and bakeries with its main markets in the Nordics and the Baltics. The conglomerate is also into aluminium solutions and financial investment sectors.
