WHY INSTAMART IS PLAYING NOICE

The q-commerce outfit is trying to become an FMCG company inside a delivery app with its new F&B private label

- Sowmya Ramasubramanian & Samiksha Goel

In a market where delivery speeds are converging and discounting is costly, private labels are emerging as one of the few structural levers left to improve margins.

Recently, Anupama, a 28-year-old lawyer in Bengaluru, was scrolling through quick commerce (q-commerce) company Swiggy Instamart’s app when a thumbnail of a packet of banana chips caught her eye. The brand, Noice, was priced slightly higher than some of the other options on the screen, including national labels she had grown up with.

“It didn’t look like a typical grocery brand at all. It felt more like something you'd pick up at a boutique food store,” Anupama told Mint. Price was not a factor but the presentation on the screen definitely was. Like a moth to a light, the bright yellow colour drew her in and she tapped on it.

That instinctive and irrational add-to-cart moment is exactly what Swiggy is betting Noice can engineer on a large scale.

When the company rolled out the food and beverage (F&B) brand in the middle of last year, it did not resemble a routine back-end grocery experiment. The packs were hard to miss—splashed in bold colours that stood out on the app’s grid of thumbnails, they quickly caught everyone’s attention.

This was not your typical atta and rice. Under Noice, Instamart has launched a wide range of items, including regional snacks, frozen favourites, protein-rich products, and impulse buys such as lime soda and premium dark chocolate.

Simply put, this is Instamart trying to become a fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) company inside a delivery app.

In a business where margins are thin and competition is intense, Noice could become the company’s most strategic lever to improve unit economics. Or it could end up as a failed bet.