Good Morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

I’ve been ordering a lot on Instamart lately. Bread, eggs, vegetables, and every single time I open the app and search for something, one brand keeps showing up with its bright truck-art packaging and products. A name that sounds vaguely cool but also confusing to me: Noice.

I thought it was just another D2C brand trying to join the quick-commerce wave, but turns out Noice is Swiggy’s own private label. And if you ask Praveen, this might be the most interesting thing Swiggy has done in years.

The last time we did a dedicated Swiggy episode was in 2024. The title was “Swiggy needs to reclaim its lost glory.” Back then, Swiggy was stuck in the worst possible place. Cut to today, has anything changed? Not really. The company went public, then raised another 10,000 crores. That’s basically going public twice. But Praveen has a thesis: Swiggy has finally found a wedge. And that wedge is Noice.

Praveen called Noice a brand. 

And that is where our guests—Sandeep Nair, co-founder of David and Who, former brand manager at P&G, Reckitt, Tata Global Beverages, and (you guessed it) Swiggy; and Mrunmayi Oke, SVP of strategy at Zilo, former head of business at Dunzo, and someone who’s built private labels at More and Aditya Birla Group—disagreed with PGK and called it a private label. 

So what’s the difference? 

And Sandeep would know. He was part of one of Swiggy’s earlier private label experiments like Homely and Bowl Company. All those brands that were launched and then quietly disappeared. He knows exactly why they failed. 

And he is right because if Swiggy wants to be Kirkland, which is Costco’s private label that became synonymous with quality, it has a long journey ahead. 

Rohin thinks Noice is closer to Amazon Solimo, only with brand colours that pop. A platform using sales data to launch rival products, using its own distribution to push them, and charging a premium through the back door.

“If you remove the noise from Noice,” Rohin says (yes, he’s very proud of this pun), “what are you left with?”

Here’s where it gets interesting from a business standpoint.

But until you build scale, you won’t hit those margins. You start at 1.2X or 1.5X. And you write off a lot of inventory because of wastage. Which is probably why Rohin got a free Noice paneer with his Instamart order.

Every ad slot Swiggy gives to Noice is an ad slot it could have sold to a third party

View in Browser

Swiggy has tried many experiments before and failed, multiple times now. Is there anything different this time? They’re sandwiched between Blinkit, which controls the lion’s share, and Zepto, which is gunning for an IPO—and they don’t have a choice. They need to make something work.

For now, Noice has already scaled from 200 to 350+ SKUs in four to five months, which is too fast. And Sandeep knows it, because he’s made that mistake before at Swiggy itself.

The episode also answers other questions. What happens to the Haldiram’s of the world when platforms push their own brands? And what’s the difference between someone who comes from an FMCG background versus someone who comes from a platform background when it comes to building brands? 

Listen to the full episode here.

What do you think? Have you tried Noice products? Comment on our website or app, or write to us at [email protected].

Until next week,
Uddantika

Get a premium subscription to The Ken

Unrivaled analysis and powerful stories about businesses from award-winning journalists. Read by 5,00,000+ subscribers globally who want to be prepared for what comes next.

Upgrade Now

Trusted by 5,00,000+ executives & leaders from the world's most successful organisations & students at top post-graduate campuses