Parle-G: The taste of comfort
Sometimes the people and the objects we love, stop being relevant to us in our daily lives. There’s always something new to be engaged with. We don’t want to live with versions of ourselves we have lived with in the past. We want to be new and better with every passing day. As we revel in newer emotions, some of the earlier ones need extraordinary situations to be rekindled. Brand Parle-G experienced something similar. The brand that one relished regularly, over the years became less exciting amidst new sensorial pleasures made available to us.
Now for a few years, the majority of the sales for the economically priced brand have been coming from the poor and the rural India who can’t afford the premium biscuits. Last year according to some media reports, due to the economic slowdown and an increase in GST the demand for Parle-G fell in the first two quarters of 2019. The company that manufactures Parle-G publicly announced that it was considering laying off up to 10,000 employees across various factories in the wake of consistently falling demand. Hearing this lot of urban consumers became nostalgic about the biscuit they regularly enjoyed during their younger days. This kind of outpour of emotions has been observed for other brands too. A very recent example is that of Atlas cycles. People were reminded of their first cycle when the manufacturer announced that it would have to shut one of its plants due to a shortage of funds. 6 years ago, when Hindustan Motors, manufacturer of the iconic car brand Ambassador shut its operations in India, a lot of people on social media platforms shared their fond memories associated with the brand.
Nostalgia often is a homage to the earlier days, without any real desire to physically live them again. From a vantage point of the ‘present’, the ‘past’ looks glorious. Nostalgia is also a marker of how far one has come. It allows us to compare our today with something that’s not today like. Brands and often the iconic ones become vehicles for this time travel within our minds.
The case of Parle-G, in the last 3 months has been similar but is not the same. Last year when the brand was struggling, society wasn’t. The mention of the brand in the media evoked nostalgic feelings, which with everyone today having easy access to a broadcasting platform did not go unexpressed. Ever since the Lockdown started, it’s the society that’s been struggling. Interestingly the demand for Parle G which was declining till last year has shot up during the 3 months of the difficult time. According to some media reports, Parle-G recorded its best sales in the last 8 decades during the lockdown period. Urban consumers reconnected with the brand by preferring to stock up on a brand that wasn’t otherwise on their regular grocery list. When the media reported about the record-breaking sales Parle-G had achieved, consumers active on social media saw it as their success. Many souls were gladdened. The success of the brand was celebrated by creating and sharing memes. One such meme read ‘Parle-G is not a biscuit, it’s an emotion.”
What is this emotion that has been rekindled lately? Why have people found solace in a humble biscuit brand? What about the biscuit makes it a public choice when the times are bad? On the surge in sales during the lockdown, senior personnel at Parle products said something interesting, “Parle-G’s consumption during times of uncertainty has increased in the past too.” While a lot of urban consumers who otherwise consume expensive biscuits and gourmet cookies preferred to buy Parle-G as well during the lockdown, the primary reason for the sudden surge in sales for the brand is being attributed to the bulk buying done by NGO’s and the government agencies to feed the migrants walking back home. The brand lends itself to becoming a part of the relief package provided to the ones in a difficult situation. This makes sense because a lot of times I have seen good Samaritans keeping Parle-G packets in their cars and offering it to the people in need at the traffic signals.
Parle-G lends itself to feeding. The biscuit constituted by the most essential and homely ingredients like the flour, milk, oil, and sugar is processed into the most elementary ready to be had packaged product that can be sourced from outside of the home. The brand laid the foundation for consumption. It introduced us to the idea of outsourcing something as basic as survival. Culturally satiation of hunger has been and continues to be a maternal domain. Parle-G bakes the soft maternal instinct into a hard biteable form that can be accessed in the outside world as easily and readily as the love and nurturance, a motherly figure would shower on her children with home-cooked food. The Brand is perched on the threshold between the home and the outside world. It sits on the cusp of dualities like; the soft & the hard, the familiar and the unfamiliar, and the feminine and the masculine. The easy, maternal, and undefined comfort of home undergoes an industrial process to solidify into a well-defined rectangular biscuit with soft edges. The processing is minimal and never to the extent that the end product is unfamiliar and exotic. The taste is unpretentiously sweet. The smell, if one has experienced it in its full glory around a Parle-G factory knows has a soothing sweet character that can’t be located in the here and now. The smell of Parle-G getting baked is redolent of childhood memories hidden deep in our minds, probably those of feeling loved and sated. The texture is hard and crisp, but ready to dissolve into a sticky and an undefined soggy state when dunked in tea. I remember as a child I had a friend who would empty a packet full of Parle-G into a cup of milky tea and self feed himself the thick baby food like mush with a spoon. Brand Parle-G packages not the aspirations that excite us but feelings that are fundamental, which alleviate us of anxiety and provide us a sense of certainty during times that are uncertain.
No matter what class we come from, what our spending capability is, whether we have been buying Parle-G lately or not, whether we feed ourselves or feed others with Parle-G, the brand unites us all through reassurance that no matter how difficult the times are, we will all be fed well. The cherubic face on the pack of Parle-G is a reminder that the need to be loved, hugged, and provided for is universal, timeless, and precious, and yet can be accessed easily and affordably.
Nostalgia evoked by the brand Parle-G is not for the times gone by but for longings, we are born with and have gotten buried under desires, we as a culture have created.
