With enhanced access to the freshest fruits to make juices, Dabur Foods will strengthen its competitive edge by being able to market larger quantities of juices made from the best quality raw material.

Importantly, this investment is expected to have a tremendous impact on the fruit growing agri-community by creating regular market demand for fruits such as pineapple, litchi, and guava that usually witness more wastage than mango and apple, due to inadequate investments in processing.

Established in heart of the fruit-growing bowl of India, this multi-fruit processing plant is the most technologically advanced. The new facility is spread over 11 acres and will extract 192 metric tonnes/day. The plant will have high capacity utilisation by processing pineapple, litchi, guava, mango and grape the year round.

Says Dabur Foods CEO Amit Burman: "The vision of Dabur Foods is to become an integrated food services company with an end-to-end presence in food procurement, processing, branding and providing related consultancy and services to partners.

"To achieve this, we adopted the unconventional strategy of first choosing to build a strong consumer brand, Real, which is India''s No 1 pure fruit juice today. We are now embarking on the second phase of our growth strategy by integrating backwards. This will result in higher profitability, enhanced access to the best fruits and complete control of the production process, helping us further strengthen our market leadership and offer the best tasting juice."

Real, which offers the largest range of eight flavours will benefit from improved sourcing across mango, pineapple, grape, guava, mixed fruit, tomato and litchi. Real Activ is available in orange, apple and orange-carrot, India''s first fruit-veg combination.

A vital component of the company''s product strategy has been to offer traditional flavours that are not usually available in packaged form. For instance, Real is the only brand to offer pink guava and litchi variants which have become very popular.

"Our new multi-fruit processing facility will bolster this strength and help us to expand our current range by giving us the flexibility to process other traditional Indian fruits as well as introduce new multi-fruit and fruit-vegetable combinations," says Burman.