Nilgai Foods introduces range of gourmet food products

Nilgai Foods forays into retail with a range of gourmet food products under the PICO brand name. The mix includes unique and highly innovative products that cover a few different categories ranging from jams and sauces to cookies, condiments and salad dressings.

Retail has been core to the Nilgai Foods business plan since inception. By tapping into India’s extensive distribution channel, PICO plans to reach out to a wider audience, achieving their mission of making gourmet food more accessible to the Indian consumer. PICO is launching the full range of retail products in over 1000 stores, both traditional as well as modern trade, across Mumbai, Pune and NCR.  Over the next few years PICO will continue to expand its footprint across India hoping to reach 30,000 stores in the next five years.

Nicole Gonsalves, Head of Product Development at Nilgai Foods, has put her refined culinary skills and extensive experience to use again while leading the R&D for this range of retail products. “Although the end result is totally different, the core fundamentals of fresh food and long life food are still exactly the same – the highest quality ingredients, a fine balance of complex flavours and careful and methodical preparation,” she said.

Founders Gadkari and Jaiswal believe that there is a significant gap in the Indian food space when it comes to chilli sauces and hot sauces: “For a country that loves chilli so much there is surprisingly little choice when it comes to buying a hot sauce. I think this is a big opportunity for whoever can capture this market. The launch of PICO’s retail products would mark Nilgai foods foray in to the retail products market, after the successful run in the QSR space with the PICO Express Chain. We aim at seeding the markets in metros as well as the small cities,” informed Arjun Gadkari.

The range of products is not restricted to hot sauces. PICO aims to cover a wide range of gourmet delicacies that can be used day-in-day-out at home: two types of salad dressings, breakfast jams, herb mixes to sprinkle onto pasta / pizza, marinades for meats or paneer, cookies, biscuits and crackers for tea time and snacks.

Pico’s Bhut Jolokia Hot Sauce, which uses the infamous ‘bhut jolokia’ (chilli) from Nagaland was the Guinness World Record holder for the world’s spiciest chilli until 2012, containing over 1 million Scoville Heat Units (SHUs) (compared to the jalapeno pepper which contains only 5000 SHUs). Pico believes that its Bhut Jolokia Hot Sauce is the spiciest sauce in India – this theory is currently being tested in the market. The chilli got its mysterious name because it was thought to be so spicy that it could scare away ghosts.