BANGALORE: Shopping may be a mundane routine today, but have you wondered what it is like to shop in Nilgiris, the country’s first self service supermarket? It goes back to the pre-Independence era, when the Burra Sahib and Memsahib got off horse-drawn carriages and spiced up their kitchen. Even before the concept of supermarkets was known to Bangaloreans, Nilgiris had won over the consumer’s buying power.
All this happened due to the foresight of S Muthuswamy Mudaliar, who hailed from a family of weavers in Tamil Nadu. An unpleasant incident compelled him to move to Ooty in search of greener pastures. The pastoral scene worked in his favour. He urged his neighbour, an Englishman, to install a cream separator and churn butter, instead of importing it from Australia in 1896. The idea clicked, subsequently the Englishman went abroad and sold the unit to Muthuswamy. The concept morphed into a butter unit called the Nilgiri Dairy farm in 1905 in Ooty.
“Since Bangalore was the base of the British Cantonment, Muthuswamy sent his 19-year-old son Chenniappan to whet the Bangalore market in 1939. Everyday, he collected the butter cans from the railway station and cycled to the Hebbal Military Dairy to make half and one pound packs of butter. These packs were sold at a kiosk on Brigade Road, which later grew into what it is today,” said Gopalakrishnan, Chenniappan’s son and third generation descendent.
Chenniappan built the business brick by brick and fanned it into roaring trade, carefully adding exotic spices, condiments and groceries, besides expanding the dairy, bakery, confectionery and department store. In all, the store retails over 24 categories of items picked from 300 domestic and international manufacturers. The visionary entrepreneur went that extra mile to create a self service supermarket when he saw people wheeling in their groceries in the neighbourhood market in UK in 1971. Back home, he implemented the concept here, which then met with stiff opposition. It’s quite understandable, as people were spoilt for choice and weren’t used to the self service facility. Today, consumers thrive on the store’s fecund gastronomical variety. It’s an open invitation to wander and browse around, as people began to drop by for fluffy cakes and pastries produced in a mechanized bakery initiated in 1972.
For many, food is an indulgence. “Another change happened in 1968 when my brother Ramachandran visited Germany. That’s when we decided to host a cake exhibition in December,” explained Gopalakrishnan, managing director, N Stores, also a supermarket which was started after a UK company picked up stakes in the family business. Visiting the annual cake exhibition may be dangerous for one’s sweet tooth. But it brings out the child in everyone, with its monumental icing cake creations of landmarks like the Taj Mahal and Buckingham Palace, among others.
To enter Nilgiris is almost like entering no other place. Though it has been around for decades, it connects to the contemporary buyer.
The charm lies in the people who run it. But it’s a challenge to run the business rather than rule it. With time, the wheels of business changed and the Nilgiris family sold the business to a UK firm Actis in 2006. However, the third generation descendents have specialized in various food related fields and branched out individually to create different brands.
kavithai@expressbuzz.com