It's Twisted, But It's India's Own — The Crunchy, Quirky Story of Kurkure

By the late 1990s, PepsiCo India, operating through its Frito-Lay snacks division, had a clear and uncomfortable read on the Indian salty snacks market. On one side stood namkeen — the traditional Indian savoury snack, sold loose or in simple packaging, priced around ₹100 per kilogram, deeply embedded in the country's eating habits for generations. On the other side stood Western-style potato chips, including PepsiCo's own Lays, priced at a significant premium of around ₹300 per kilogram — a format that Indian consumers enjoyed but that still felt, in flavour and identity, like an import rather than something genuinely their own.

Between these two worlds lay an enormous, unclaimed space. Geetu Verma, one of the founding team members who strategised the brand's 1999 launch and who would later become Executive Director at Hindustan Unilever, described the brand's origin candidly: "The birth of Kurkure was part necessity, part serendipity." The necessity was clear — PepsiCo needed a product that could compete with namkeen on cultural familiarity while moving faster than potato chips into a market that was, at the time, growing at a remarkable pace.

PepsiCo's research and development team, led by Dr. T.S.R. Murali, set out to build something that belonged authentically to neither category but borrowed credibility from both: a crunchy, extruded snack made from rice, gram, and corn meal, seasoned with bold Indian spice profiles inspired by chutneys and home-style masalas.

The product went through 220 development trials before the team settled on a final form and flavour. And in one of those consumer testing sessions, something happened that would define the brand forever: when people tasted the snack, they kept repeating the same word, again and again — "kurkura," the Hindi word for crunchy.

The team didn't need to look any further for a name.

A Cautious Launch in Chandigarh

PepsiCo's marketing team, including Deepika Warrier, who would go on to serve as Vice President of Marketing, admitted to genuine uncertainty about how Indian consumers would respond to an entirely new snack category. That uncertainty showed up in the brand's earliest name: rather than launching as Kurkure alone, the product was introduced as Lehar Kurkure — borrowing credibility from Lehar, PepsiCo India's existing namkeen brand, to give the unfamiliar new product a familiar anchor.

In October 1999, Lehar Kurkure launched in northern India, beginning specifically in Chandigarh, in its original Masala Munch flavour. The market entry was executed with unusual intensity. According to accounts from the launch team, almost the entire PepsiCo India sales force assembled in Chandigarh to ensure complete coverage of retail outlets within just ten days — an aggressive, all-hands distribution push designed to make the new product visible everywhere at once, rather than allowing it to trickle into the market gradually.

The strategy worked immediately. "It was perhaps one of our fastest market placements ever," a former PepsiCo India employee recalled. "We knew in the first 30 days itself that there was no looking back."

Vani Gupta, then PepsiCo India's marketing director, framed the deeper strategic significance of the launch: "This is the first time we've gone after local palate preferences in a big way." Kurkure was PepsiCo India's first product fully developed within the country — not an adaptation of an existing global PepsiCo snack, but something built from the ground up for the Indian consumer.

PepsiCo coined a term for the new space Kurkure occupied: the "bridge category" — sitting between traditional namkeen and Western-style chips, belonging fully to neither.

Building the Market, One Region at a Time

Following the success in Chandigarh and the broader northern market, PepsiCo replicated its aggressive distribution approach across other regions. By 2005, Kurkure had reached over 100,000 retail outlets nationwide. South and East India — regions where initial penetration had been comparatively low — became deliberate areas of investment, with targeted distribution expansion and flavour adaptations designed to resonate with regional palates.

The retail experience itself became a site of marketing innovation. PepsiCo was among the first in the snack category to introduce "ladis" — hanging strings of small Kurkure packs that shopkeepers could display prominently in their stores, making the product impossible to miss at the point of purchase. In 2001, the company went further, providing physical display racks to shopkeepers to showcase the brand outside their stores — a retail visibility strategy that one shopkeeper, quoted in a retrospective business case study, specifically credited as a first for the category.

By the mid-2000s, the results of this sustained distribution and innovation effort were unmistakable. Kurkure had grown into a ₹1,000 crore brand for PepsiCo India and commanded approximately 60 percent market share within its self-created "bridge category" — a segment that had not existed before Kurkure built it.

Tedha Hai Par Mera Hai: The Insight That Became a Movement

In 2004 and 2005, Kurkure brought on Bollywood actress Juhi Chawla as its first major celebrity brand ambassador. The pairing was, by the marketing team's own account, a natural fit: Chawla's persona — vivacious, cheerful, progressive, possessed of a genuine sense of humour — mirrored exactly the personality PepsiCo wanted Kurkure to project. The partnership lasted from roughly 2005 to 2011, anchoring the brand's identity through its first major phase of national growth.

Then, in 2008, Kurkure's advertising agency JWT India developed what would become one of the most enduring and culturally embedded campaign platforms in Indian advertising history: "Tedha Hai Par Mera Hai" — "It's twisted, but it's mine."

The insight behind the campaign was rooted in something deeply familiar to Indian family life: the idea that every family has members with quirks, imperfections, and idiosyncrasies — and that those imperfections, rather than being a source of embarrassment, are precisely what make them lovable and irreplaceable. The campaign translated this emotional truth directly onto the product itself: Kurkure's distinctively twisted, irregular shape was not a flaw to apologise for. It was the very thing that made it authentic, characterful, and unmistakably itself.

This was, in the language of brand strategy, a near-perfect alignment between physical product truth and emotional brand promise. The twisted shape of the snack became the literal, edible proof of the platform's message. There was no gap between what the product looked like and what the brand claimed to stand for.

The campaign captured the cultural imagination so completely that "Tedha Hai Par Mera Hai" began to be used informally by Indians describing their own quirky, lovable family members and friends — a rare instance of an advertising tagline genuinely entering everyday conversational language.

From One Face to an Entire Family

In December 2012, Kurkure made a deliberate and significant evolution to its "Tedha Hai Par Mera Hai" platform. Rather than continuing with a single celebrity ambassador, the brand introduced what it called the Kurkure "screen family" — a six-member ensemble cast designed by JWT featuring some of Bollywood's most recognisable names: Parineeti Chopra, Kunal Kapoor, Boman Irani, Farida Jalal, Ramya Krishnan, and a young actor named Shivansh.

Each character was given a distinct comic identity within the family unit: Farida Jalal played the "Social Butterfly Dadi," Boman Irani played "Chupa Rustam," Ramya Krishnan played the "Perfect Bhabhi," and Kunal Kapoor played a Bollywood-style banker son, with Parineeti Chopra rounding out the cast. The shift from a single ambassador to a multi-character family unit reflected a deliberate strategic recalibration: rather than concentrating all of the brand's equity in one celebrity's personal image, Kurkure distributed its storytelling across an ensemble that could represent the full, layered dynamics of a real Indian household — and that could continue evolving its narratives without being dependent on any single star's continued availability or relevance.

PepsiCo's category director for Indian snacks, Nalin Sood, explained the rationale candidly: the brand needed to "monetise the Kurkure brand equity" by appealing to a wider range of consumer cohorts simultaneously — tweens, younger adults, and family decision-makers — rather than relying on a single image to do all of that work. "You cannot have all the innovations appealing to the same person," Sood noted, "or the one thing appealing to everybody."

The campaign's first major outing under this new family format launched on 29 January 2013, supported by what the brand described as a full 360-degree marketing plan spanning television, print, radio activation, and digital media engagement — promoting a new Extra Large party pack built around the culturally resonant insight that "there is no such concept as a small family party in India."

Riding the Festive Season and Regional Pride

Kurkure's marketing calendar consistently leaned into one of the richest emotional territories in Indian consumer culture: festivals.

Beginning several years before 2012, Kurkure began positioning itself as an alternative to traditional sweets during Diwali, building campaigns around the playful line "Zyada Meetha Ho Gaya, Muh Kurkure Karo" — roughly, "Had too much sweet? Make your mouth Kurkure instead." Bobby Pawar, then Chief Creative Officer at JWT India, explained the thinking behind this festive positioning: Indian families inevitably end up including a wide circle of friends and extended relations in what was meant to be a small festive gathering, and Kurkure positioned itself as the practical, enjoyable answer to that very Indian problem of hospitality always expanding beyond its original guest list.

The brand also built regional specificity into its festival marketing — creating dedicated campaigns tied to Durga Pujo in the East and Ganesh Chaturthi in the West, and in 2008, producing what is described as the first major salty snack brand commercial made exclusively for the South Indian market, featuring regional film actress Simran as the face of the brand in Tamil-speaking markets.

Weathering the Storm: The Plastic Rumour

No discussion of Kurkure's brand journey would be complete without addressing one of the most persistent consumer rumours in Indian FMCG history: the claim, which circulated widely from the mid-2000s onward and resurfaced periodically online, that Kurkure contained plastic.

The claim was false. Kurkure's composition — rice, gram or lentils, and corn meal, providing the carbohydrate base responsible for its distinctive crunch — was independently tested and confirmed not to contain plastic. PepsiCo responded by having products retested in laboratories and engaging directly with public concern. Despite the company's efforts, the rumour proved difficult to fully extinguish, circulating for years through word of mouth and later through social media, illustrating how persistent misinformation about food safety can become even when the underlying claim has been factually addressed.

The episode is a reminder that Kurkure's journey, like that of most large consumer brands, included genuine reputational challenges that the company had to actively and continuously manage alongside its marketing successes.

Recognising the Modern Indian Homemaker

In November 2019, Kurkure introduced a new positioning, "Khayal Toh Chatpata Hai" ("The thinking is spicy too"), fronted by Bollywood actress Taapsee Pannu. The campaign was built around a deliberate recognition of the modern Indian homemaker as a figure of progressive thinking and quiet authority within the household — described by the brand's marketing partners as the "Chief Operating Officer" of the home, whose dedication and forward-looking ideologies keep a household running while often going unacknowledged.

As part of this campaign, Kurkure introduced a new brand mascot, "Ms. Kurkure," conceptualised by Wunderman Thompson specifically to foster conversation around contemporary, colloquial social topics on digital platforms. The brand also partnered with ZEEL and Mindshare's Content+ initiative, embedding Kurkure's brand narrative into storylines across eight television network shows — allowing the protagonists of popular serials to deliver the brand's message of progressive thinking within the context of stories Indian audiences were already emotionally invested in.

The Marketing Strategy That Made a Snack Into a Cultural Mirror

Kurkure's marketing approach, sustained and evolved across more than two decades, rests on a set of distinctive strategic choices.

Product-identity alignment as the foundation. The single most important strategic decision in Kurkure's history was recognising that its physically twisted, irregular shape could be transformed from a manufacturing characteristic into the brand's core emotional metaphor. "Tedha Hai Par Mera Hai" worked because there was no gap between the product's physical truth and the brand's claimed identity — the twist you could see and feel in your hand was the same twist the brand was asking you to celebrate in the people you loved.

Category creation through deliberate positioning between two markets. Rather than competing head-on with either traditional namkeen or Western-style chips, Kurkure built and named an entirely new "bridge category," giving PepsiCo a market it could define and dominate on its own terms rather than fighting for share within an established, more competitive segment.

Evolving celebrity strategy from individual to ensemble. Kurkure's transition from a single ambassador (Juhi Chawla) to a multi-character family ensemble in 2012 reflected a sophisticated understanding of how to sustain a campaign platform across changing audience segments and cultural moments, without becoming permanently tied to any one celebrity's personal brand trajectory.

Festive and regional localisation as sustained relevance. By consistently building dedicated campaigns around major Indian festivals and regional cultural moments — Diwali, Durga Pujo, Ganesh Chaturthi, and South Indian markets specifically — Kurkure ensured its marketing calendar remained perpetually woven into the actual rhythms of Indian cultural life, rather than relying solely on generic, year-round advertising.

Transparent crisis response. When confronted with the persistent and damaging plastic rumour, PepsiCo's response of independent lab retesting and direct public engagement, while not immediately or fully successful in eliminating the misinformation, demonstrated the kind of sustained, fact-based crisis management that large consumer brands must commit to over the long term.

A Snack That Became a Mirror for India Itself

Kurkure's journey from a 1999 product launch in Chandigarh to one of PepsiCo India's flagship, ₹1,000-crore-plus snack brands is, at its heart, a story about a company that understood something subtle about Indian identity: that the most powerful brand platforms are not built on aspiration toward perfection, but on the comfortable, confident embrace of imperfection.

"Tedha Hai Par Mera Hai" succeeded because it told Indian consumers something they already believed about their own families but had rarely heard articulated so simply: that the things that are a little twisted, a little irregular, a little imperfect, are very often the things we love the most precisely because they are ours.

A snack built from rice, gram, and corn meal became, through more than two decades of consistent, culturally attuned marketing, something far more significant than a product on a shelf. It became a small, crunchy mirror — twisted at the edges, exactly like the families who keep reaching for the next handful.