Mumbai: A new variant of Modern bread will soon find a prominent place on the shelves of your favourite grocer - for the first time.

Hindustan Lever Ltd (HLL), the owner of Modern Foods Industries Ltd, maker of Modern bread, is in the process of launching a new whole wheat-meal bread variant - branded Modern atta bread of the Modern bread brand.

Say an HLL spokesperson: ''The new variant has been positioned as 'Fortified with Annapurna atta.' Since Annapurna atta has achieved a tremendous equity in the market, we decided to leverage the new bread brand with the atta brand.''

Annapurna atta, initially launched as Kissan Annapurna atta, has, over the years, attained a very strong brand equity. It is now the largest-selling packaged atta brand in India in the organised sector.

Analysts say Modern Foods fits into HLL's major thrust in the area of foods. The company's branded atta business (under the Annapurna brand) has been showing a handsome growth. In this context, Modern Foods has a strategic fit with the HLL's business plans. There are direct-buying synergies in the area of wheat procurement, which ensures that maida, the main raw material for bread, is made available at the desired quality and at the most competitive prices to the company.

Besides bread, the Modern brand has been extended to cakes and rusks in a few Indian states. In due course, HLL also plans to look at biscuits as a potential category and may launch these under the Modern brand.

Now, Modern Atta bread will be priced at Rs 9 for a 400-gm pack - similar to competing brands like Britannia and Harvest Gold. Modern Milk Classic is also priced similarly, but is available in two-pack sizes.

HLL has been trying to synergise the Modern Food brand with its other brands at regional levels. In New Delhi, for instance sometime back Modern buns were promoted along with Kwality Walls ice-cream and Taj Mahal tea.

The company's focus is now on increasing sales volumes by developing new varieties of bakery products and identifying more cost-effective bread improvers for improving the quality of bread.

Since it is a fresh-market product, which demands clockwork supply-chain management, Modern atta bread will be rolled out in phases across the country. At present the brand is available in New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai.

While Modern bread is strong in the southern states, HLL plans to reinforce its distribution across the western and northern markets, and specifically in regions where the brand is not directly present.

HLL has also been using every trick in the book to push the sales of Modern bread. Last year, the marketing tactics included giving away face-away sachets with a loaf of bread, or maybe even a ticket to a fortune - to energise housewives bored with the daily drudgery of making breakfast and packing tiffins for the family.

HLL had also tied up with the branded jewellery-maker Oyzterbay and offered buyers of Modern bread prizes in 22K gold (five mega prizes of Rs 1 lakh each), which included Oyzterbay treasure chests of gold and gemset jewellery. Apart from this it gave away 25,000 Oyzterbay certificates, ranging from Rs 101 to Rs 5001 for others - all this for a 400-gm milk bread pack priced at Rs 10.

Annapurna atta was first launched under the brand name of Kissan Annapurna. It was only late last year that Hindustan Lever spun off Kissan-Annapurna into two separate umbrella brands. Thus, while the Kissan brand was to be used to market aspirational food products for kids, Annapurna was to be the flagship brand for all kinds of staple food like atta, freshly-iodised salt and the about-to-be-launched ready-to-eat chapattis.

Says a company official: ''Kissan was initially used to showcase Annapurna as a Lever product, and after Annapurna had built a market for itself with substantial brand recall the company decided to separate the two.''

The official says the company has identified food brands Kissan, Annapurna, Knorr, Dalda and Modern for fuelling topline growth in the foods business. ''The International Best Foods (taken over by HLL last year) brand Knorr will be the umbrella brand for culinary products like masalas, recipe mixes, taste-enhancers and cooking pastes. It has also been decided that all wheat-based products will be marketed under the brand name Modern, while Dalda will be HLL's vanaspati brand.''

According to industry data, the size of the bread market is estimated at Rs 2,000 crore (inclusive of organised and unorganised sectors). The market, however, is dominated by the unorganised sector. Modern and Britannia have the largest share of the organised market at 7 per cent and 4 per cent, respectively. The other significant player in the organised market is Harvest Gold.