Maggi launched in 1983. And I was in the team that launched Top Ramen and Cup Noodles, in 1989 under Hindustan Lever (actually Brooke Bond India Limited). I have seen Maggi from up close as a competitor, and there won't be many like me, because only a few have done national launches for noodles.
Unfortunately, again due to an interpretation in the Packaging Commodities Act we had to withdraw Top Ramen from the market - top 30 towns. I can empathise with Maggi of what it takes to withdraw products you make with so much love and destroy it. A national loss. It takes time to recover.
Maggi is not just a fast-to-cook, good-to-eat snack, it is a generic, for wet snack meals. If you have been out in the markets in India, there are very few nooks which don't have a van selling Maggi.
Being Maggi - needs deeper understanding.
After becoming being a regular home snack, it has also moved out of the home a long time ago and has found itself a place in Indian Street Food genre. It is the substratum which enables creative street food artists to use their imagination to make meals using Maggi noodles, but the meal looks nothing like what Maggi Noodles is meant to be. Maggi is relegated to be an excuse, for meal creation. Add Chicken stock and spring onion and eat its soupy form. Or dry with shredded chicken pieces, or Green peas. Take your pick. There are as many ways as there are moods!
Maggi's absence created a void in the after school snack meal space. It was Mommy’s savior.
But why is Maggi more popular than Top Ramen or WaiWai? The main reason I think is not only the marketing effort of Nestle, but the versatility Maggi as a products that can metamorphose into a meal of "my making". It is the food canvas on which I can experiment as I want. It does not tell me that "you have made a meal out of what was already a meal". I can claim that the dish is my creation.
When I was involved in launching TopRamen I always felt that it was a better tasting product than Maggi. But slow and poor marketing of TopRamen never allowed it to surface the way it should have. Or is it that Indians prefer the European noodles and not the Oriental Noodles of Wai Wai and TopRamen, both of which are pre-seasoned noodles think noodles.
All I can say is that let things be. Just enjoy what ever suits you. Maggi adds to the colour of the Indian street food!
But keep it safe, keep it tasty.
Off-topic, but can't help stop.
ReplyDeleteGutka, Beedi, Cheap Booze and Weed will kill people for sure... Maggi might. May be it’s politically correct to vitiate a product, that costs just Rs 10, for MSG. And may be it’s correct too to turn a blind eye to the ever-booming Chinese culinary where massive MSG is the norm, not exception. Might be, Nestle forgot to grease its palms at some place, with lead-smooth oil (If it did, might be it would not have happened at the first place). May be we’re immune to food poisoning, and the rest is a hoax.
Fact is - Maggi was a perfect love of the noob who thought he could cook, and hope for the hard-pressed geek who buried himself in the studies. That’s why Maggiholics were going through chronic withdrawal. They were for sure torn between a strong tug of nostalgia and some serious health concern. The Maggi comeback commercial is a reflection of just that.
Radha Sir, forgot to add. I really liked your post. And it's very timely too. Please keep enlightening us with more such experiences from your retail journey.
ReplyDeleteManmath. You bring a a very refreshing angle to the story. Mabyn thanks
ReplyDeleteMaggi is in a sense the MNC cousin of the Dosa - versatile, open to culinary interpretation and co-opted by many cultures and regions. Moreover its Indian avatar has proved that there is 'life after death'. For a product that many had written an epitaph for, Maggi has made a comeback that is a marketing pro's dream. Nostalgic Maggi fans are going for it like Mallus queueing up outside Beverage Corp outlets before dry day ;)
ReplyDeleteThanks you Sir! Manoj's take is every bit interesting too. Back circa 1999, I used to have Maggi - the stock and vanilla, Boil the water sprinkle the masala and then the noodles. That was the time when prodigals like me bunked everything under the sun, and consequently had to burn our heads on pillow when the exam dates were merging very fast. And mid-night maggi was the answer to our hopeless lives. In professional life, I experimented maggi with egg, chicken, and you might wonder, fried fish.
ReplyDeleteAs for Top Ramen, we loved it very much, but actually we never put our hands on. My place, Brahmapur University, could see it on magazine pages. May be, maggi did some strong arm tactics to be exclusively on all the shelves.