Fifteen years after it exited the consumer goods business, the Tata group wants to return. The Tatas were once a big name in soaps and detergents.
Tata Chemicals will spearhead the new initiative and has identified home and fabric care as the first products to be launched by the end of 2008. More will follow — both for India and the overseas market.
“We will have a slew of consumer products launched between December and March. We will offer low-cost options for consumers in India in home care and fabric care products,” R Mukundan, executive vice-president for chemicals, Tata Chemicals, told Financial Chronicle.
It has to compete with multinational Hindustan Unilever and Procter & Gamble and a host of Indian firms such as Nirma.
The FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) initiative will be in the care of a new consumer products business division, which will subsume the present food additives business.
The initiative is encouraged by the fact that Tata Chemicals has outdone all in the branded table salt market. It has three salt brands — Tata Salt, which, according to company officials, is the No.1 brand in India with a 43.4 per cent market share; I-Shakti; and the recently introduced low-sodium Tata Salt Lite.
The firm has also launched sodium bicarbonate in single-use sachets under the Tata Samunder Cooking Soda brand. It now plans other products based on sodium bicarb.

According to Mukundan, the R&D- based products aim at “the bottom of the pyramid.” What he calls the value- for- money niche, the products should emerge as a “sizeable and scaleable business.”
“We are developing these products for the masses. We expect they will be relevant to housewives in developing markets all over the world. We expect to build the consumer products business into a size comparable to our other segments (inorganic chemicals and fertilisers) over the next three years,” says Mukundan.
Fabric care is estimated to be a Rs 8,800 crore market in India. It consists of three sub-segments — pre-wash, main wash and post- wash. The home care market includes dish wash, surface cleaner and toilet cleaner.
Tata Chemicals, which operates in four continents, hopes to take the mass- market products to Morocco, Kenya and Tanzania in Africa and countries in Latin America.
The bicarb business contributes a very small portion of the company’s inorganic chemicals revenues, but a disproportionately high share in its profits, say company officials.
The aim is move towards branded products. For this, it has developed specialised applications of bicarb, which is now consumed mainly as a food additive and in industrial and pharmaceutical use. This will yield higher margins.
“In the Netherlands, we have a plant to make 50,000 tonnes per annum (tpa) of bicarb for food and pharmaceutical applications. A 60,000 tpa plant in the UK will make specialised grades used for cutting the sulphur content in gas emissions from factories. Besides, we are expanding our capacities in India to manufacture grades suited for specialised applications,” says Mukundan.