Pickled Profits

India’s gherkin exports are booming

Indian gherkins are considered some of the best in the world. Prathap Nair
01 September, 2014

ON A WEEKDAY IN MID JULY, I arrived at the factory of Vishaal Natural Food Products, in the town of Korategere in Karnataka, about a hundred kilometres north-west of Bangalore. The odour of vinegar emanated through the gate as I presented myself to a security guard. Once inside, I headed for the company’s offices. In an outer room, amid the din filtering in from the adjacent production floor, three clerks sat at tables overflowing with files and telephones. Beyond lay the office of Madhusudan, the company’s owner, a soft-spoken, middle-aged man who seemed shy of attention. Posters of gherkins and chillies hung on the wall. Madhusudan’s desk was crammed with jars and cans bearing a variety of labels, all filled with pickled gherkins.

Gherkins, popular across Europe and North America and almost ubiquitous in the salads and sandwiches of many multinational fast-food chains, are big business for Madhusudan, and increasingly for India. Madhusudan operates out of the country’s “gherkin belt,” a swathe of territory overlapping Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, where gherkin cultivation is booming and a growing number of companies pickle and sometimes also bottle gherkins for international brands. The soil and climate here—temperatures range between 15 and 35 degrees Celsius year-round—allow for up to three annual harvests, and produce gherkins considered to be of high quality, giving India an edge over rival producers such as Vietnam, Ukraine, China and Turkey.

“Gherkin crop is grown in a total of 50,000 acres, involving one lakh farmers,” Chennappa Gowda, the secretary of the Indian Gherkin Exporters’ Association, told me over the phone. According to the IGEA, India currently has 51 gherkin processing companies—27 in Karnataka, 19 in Tamil Nadu, three in Andhra Pradesh, and one each in Maharashtra and Gujarat. Production started in the early 1990s, and kicked up sharply at the end of that decade. From Rs 50 crore in fiscal year 1997, Indian gherkin exports rose to Rs 857 crore in fiscal year 2012. Still, India controls only a small share of the global processed gherkin market—$0.14 billion of a total estimated value of $2.85 billion, according to the IGEA.

Much of the cultivation involves farmers in relatively remote parts of the country who have limited access to other markets, and for them gherkins are a real boon. The IGEA counts roughly 131,500 small and marginal farmers growing gherkins in India today. Even for two harvests a year, it calculates, they earn profits of about Rs 40,000 per acre. Gherkins, a hybrid variety of cucumber, are highly perishable, and must reach a production facility the very day they are picked to guarantee the quality of the pickled product. This makes them especially suited to intensive localised cultivation of the kind seen in the gherkin belt. “Besides,” Madhusadan said, “farmers on the fringes of cities like Bangalore will never prefer to grow gherkins since their resources will only sustain them to meet the vegetable demand for cities.”

The industry has its challenges. Gherkins are monsoon dependent, and Madhusudan told me he was worried about the erratic rainfall this year denting production and profits. He hoped, though, that the rains would pick up later in the season. Manufacturing companies have also had to invest in specialised training for farmers—seed sowing, drip irrigation to minimise water use, pest control—to ensure they deliver high-quality produce.

Despite the production boom, the industry relies almost entirely on foreign demand. “Almost 99 percent of gherkins produced and processed here are exported, and the local market gets only 1 percent,” Madhusudan explained. The largest final market is the United States, where each person is estimated to consume a whopping average of four kilograms of gherkins every year. On a tour to explain the production process—from unloading fresh gherkins, to sorting them by hand, to pickling them in vinegar—Devaraj Marer, Madhusudan’s factory manager, offered me a gherkin, before popping one into his own mouth. He was happy to crunch into a gherkin as a snack, he said, but wouldn’t have them with his meals. “These pickles,” he said diplomatically, “are unlike what we have.”