Kurkure: The Snack Born From a Room Full of Indians Saying "Kurkura"

Sometimes the best brand names aren't invented in a boardroom, they're overheard. Kurkure's name, and much of its early identity, came directly from ordinary Indian consumers describing exactly what they tasted.

A Gap Between Chips and Namkeen

In 1996, PepsiCo India launched Lehar as a savoury snack brand. Three years later, in 1999, the company introduced Kurkure as a sub-brand under Lehar, with a very specific strategic problem to solve. Geetu Verma, part of the founding team behind the launch, later described the brand's birth as part necessity, part serendipity. India's snacking market at the time was split awkwardly in two: potato chips, priced at a noticeable premium around Rs 300 per kilo, and traditional namkeen, priced far lower around Rs 100 per kilo. PepsiCo wanted to carve out an entirely new space, a product that could compete with namkeen's familiar, everyday appeal while capturing market share faster than chips alone ever could.

A Name Born From Consumer Feedback, Not a Marketing Meeting

The product itself, an extruded snack made from rice, corn, and gram flour, seasoned with Indian spices, reportedly took around 220 trials to get right. But its most memorable feature might be its name. During consumer sampling sessions, people kept describing the snack using one word, again and again: "kurkura," meaning crunchy. According to Dr. T.S.R. Murali, then Head of R&D at PepsiCo India, the brand name Kurkure emerged directly out of that repeated consumer feedback in a group discussion, rather than from an internal branding exercise.

Packaged in bright, eye-catching orange, and positioned around the idea of "familiar taste in an innovative format," Kurkure launched with the tagline "Kya Karen, Control Nahin Hota," playfully admitting that the snack's intensely spiced, addictive flavour made it hard to stop eating. The strategy worked remarkably quickly. According to a former PepsiCo India employee, the company knew within the first thirty days of launch that the product had genuinely connected with consumers.

Winning Shelf Space, One Innovation at a Time

Kurkure's early growth wasn't only about taste and branding, it was also about rethinking distribution. The brand was reportedly the first in its snack segment to introduce "ladis," strings of small packs that shopkeepers could hang directly in their stores, making the product more visible and accessible at the point of sale. In 2001, PepsiCo went a step further, providing dedicated display racks to shopkeepers outside their stores, a move shopkeepers themselves later credited as a genuinely useful innovation in how snacks were merchandised.

Fighting Off a Serious Rival With One Simple Line

Kurkure's dominance didn't go unchallenged. In 2007, ITC Foods entered the market with its own snack brand, Bingo, including a variant called Tedhe Medhe that gained real traction and consumer attention. Facing this competitive threat, PepsiCo responded with a new campaign built around the phrase "Tedha Hai Par Mera Hai," roughly translating to "it's crooked, but it's mine." The line did more than defend market share, it reframed Kurkure's irregular, imperfect shape as something to embrace rather than apologise for, extending that same philosophy to Indian families and even Indian cities themselves, embracing their quirks and imperfections with affection. The phrase became genuinely embedded in everyday conversation, with people casually applying "tedha hai par mera hai" to describe their hometowns or close friends, a rare instance of an ad line becoming part of ordinary Indian speech.

A Rotating Cast of Familiar Faces

Over the following decades, Kurkure built consistent visibility through a long, evolving roster of Indian film and television personalities. Early commercials in the early 2000s featured television actresses Mandira Bedi and Pooja Ghai, followed by Bollywood actress Juhi Chawla in 2004. Kareena Kapoor came on board in 2008 to endorse the Kurkure Desi Beats range, the same year the brand launched in Tamil media with actress Simran as its regional face. In 2012, Kurkure brought together a wider ensemble, including Parineeti Chopra, Kunal Kapoor, Boman Irani, Ramya Krishnan, and Farida Jalal. Samantha Ruth Prabhu and Taapsee Pannu appeared in the brand's commercials in 2019, followed by Akshay Kumar alongside Kritika Kamra and Samantha Ruth Prabhu in 2021 and 2022, and more recently, Sara Ali Khan in 2024. The brand also expanded internationally, launching in Pakistan in 2008.

Weathering a Genuine Crisis of Misinformation

Not every chapter of Kurkure's journey has been about clever advertising. In 2018, PepsiCo obtained an injunction from the Delhi High Court directing several social media platforms to remove or block content spreading false claims that Kurkure was made of plastic, a rumour that had circulated widely online, seemingly fuelled by misunderstanding around the product's starch content and its tendency to be combustible in certain conditions. The legal action drew its own controversy, as the takedown effort also affected content that was clearly parody, raising questions about how brands should respond to viral misinformation without appearing to suppress legitimate commentary.

The Marketing Strategy: Turn Imperfection Into a Personality

What makes Kurkure genuinely distinctive as a brand is how consistently its marketing has leaned into personality and playfulness rather than purely functional claims. From "Kya Karen, Control Nahin Hota" to "Masti Bole To Kurkure," a tagline that let the brand comment on topical, everyday situations with humour, to "Sab Family Ban Jaye," aimed at young people living away from their families, Kurkure's advertising history reads less like a series of product pitches and more like an ongoing, evolving conversation with Indian pop culture. Its most successful campaign, "Tedha Hai Par Mera Hai," captured this instinct perfectly, turning a literal product flaw, its irregular shape, into an emotional strength, giving the brand a genuinely distinctive personality in a category where most competitors were still selling on taste and price alone. More recently, the brand extended this same playful, self-aware tone toward Gen Z audiences with its Kurkure Playz sub-brand and the "Halke Mein Lo" campaign, encouraging young consumers to face stressful situations with humour rather than tension.

From a Consumer's Word to a Household Name

Kurkure's journey, from a single word overheard in a consumer research session to one of India's most recognisable snack brands, is ultimately a reminder that the best brand identities often come from listening closely, to how people actually talk, what they actually value, and what makes them laugh, rather than deciding all of it in advance.