Nature’s Basket, the gourmet food retail chain from Spencer’s, is raising the bar by launching a new format under brand ‘Artisan Pantry’, which aspires to imitate the experience of Harrods Food Halls.

The first such department store is going to open at the Phoenix Palladium Mall in Mumbai on Saturday, followed by one on Judges Court Road, Alipore in Calcutta before Christmas.

From Manuka honey to caviar, cheese room to cured meat, exotic fruits to salt bar, coffee, chocolates and Turkish sweets, the spread is touted to be unmatched in India.

“Traditionally when you look at Nature’s Basket, they are essentially in the space of gourmet retailing but they are in the premium space. What we are now doing is we are redefining that and converting it to luxury grocery in a way,” Shashwat Goenka, who took over as the chairman of Spencer’s earlier this year, said.

Nature’s Basket, a subsidiary of Spencer’s Retail, plans to set up three such concept stores by March and add another 3-5 outlets next year.

The third one in this fiscal will come up on Linking Road, Mumbai. The company plans to tap Delhi and Bangalore going forward in the medium term.

Artisan Pantry is going to be ‘heavy on experience’ Goenka insisted, explaining a spread of 12,500 square feet in Palladium Mall. The outlet in Alipore will cover about 7,000 square feet. In comparison, a typical Nature’s Basket outlet is spread over 2,500 square feet.

The company believes that there is a market for luxury food items in India. Goenka claimed about half of the items that the stores would retail are not available in India, online or otherwise.

“We are going to be having a lot of things which are only going to be available in this store and in these concept stores for the first time in india — whether it’s a Buddha hand lemon or white strawberries from Japan or fresh Yuzu fruit or cactus fig from Europe — (we) really worked on the entire range. Sea asparagus is something that’s not available anywhere in Asia and we are actually going to be importing that from the Netherlands,” Goenka said.

The company management argues that there is a market for luxury food and a large part of the research came from the company’s existing consumers. Each store will call for an investment of Rs 3-5 crore and each city could have 2-5 stores depending on their purchasing potential.

Goenka said the stores would be profitable from the second month of operations and they would hasten the company’s journey to profitability. Given the bigger size of the stores compared to a regular Nature’s Basket, they would also add to the topline.

There are 32 outlets of Nature’s Basket, a company the Goenkas acquired from Godrej in 2019. The plan for next year is to open about 8-10 stores including Artisan Pantry.