MAM
Rajiv Singh exits Haldiram’s as head of marketing, QSR business
Rajiv Singh bids Haldiram’s goodbye after an eight-month sprint at the top The marketing veteran signs off as head of marketing, QSR business, leaving behind Veg Dum Biryani and a stack of festive campaigns
BENGALURU: Rajiv Singh has closed the chapter on his stint at Haldiram’s, wrapping up his run as head of marketing, QSR business. Brief as the tenure was, barely eight months since January 2026, Singh packed it with the kind of high-visibility work that gets noticed: The Great Summer Chillers, Teej Utsav, Nav Utsav and the launch of Veg Dum Biryani all carry his fingerprints. He also tightened partnerships with District, CRED, Dineout, Swiggy and Zomato, pushed the omnichannel agenda and backed new store rollouts for one of India’s most recognisable food brands.
None of this is a fluke. Singh arrives with 16 years of FMCG and retail marketing behind him, and the CV reads like a masterclass in brand-building across formats. At ITC Limited he spent three years and nine months building the cloud kitchen business under ITC Food Tech, steering campaigns for Sunfeast Baked Creations that leaned hard into influencer and celebrity marketing, including tie-ups with Royal Challengers Bengaluru players. Before that, at Happilo International, he ran brand marketing and strategic alliances, most memorably as title sponsor for the Rajasthan Royals. And before that, at Blackberrys Menswear, he did the sort of thing case studies are written about, growing the brand from Rs 443 crore to Rs 1,000 crore in 30 months, launching India’s first 100 per cent cotton knitted trousers, and creating India Khaki Week, a campaign that lifted khaki sales by 339 per cent.
The through-line across ITC, Happilo, Blackberrys, Cheil Worldwide and Spencer’s Retail is a marketer who treats retail hygiene, visual merchandising and celebrity association as parts of one machine rather than separate disciplines. At Cheil, he ran visual merchandising across 18,000-plus stores for Samsung India. At Spencer’s, he built the retailer’s first third-party funded campaign from scratch in Lucknow.
Singh leaves Haldiram’s with warm words for the leadership, Umesh Kumar Agarwal among them, and an evident fondness for the team he built campaigns with. Where he lands next is the question the industry will be watching, given a CV this stacked rarely stays idle for long.
