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The Company: Anand Milk Union Ltd (Amul), owned by the cooperative society Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation, is an Indian dairy giant that just made history by overtaking every fast-moving consumer goods company from Hindustan Unilever to Nestle, with a milestone Rs 1 lakh crore turnover in FY26. It sells 25 billion packs annually, through a network of 20,000 distributors and 2.8 million retailers.
The Big Move: Amul has unveiled a highly ambitious strategy that entails the launch of products in multiple categories at once, with the onus on its distribution muscle to make a success out of these products.
The Rollout: With a hundred new launches in the past 12 months, 1,200 packs of products (stock keeping units or SKUs) and 50-plus products, it is moving on from its storied near-eight-decade-old farmers-cooperative legacy built on milk, butter and cheese. Now the Amul brand includes products from protein shakes to frozen pizza, butter cookies to organic atta, kaju katli to blueberry yogurt, mashed potato to roti softener.
The Problem: Amul was churning out too many products and that was resulting in inconsistent availability. Viral Reddit discussion boards such as
#AmulPagalHoChukaHai (Amul has gone mad) exemplified this issue.
The Strategy: Let the channel decide what it wants to sell.
The Game Plan: Amul segregated all products into four distribution highways - ambient, chilled, fresh and frozen. Bolstering the highway strategy is Amul’s blue ocean and red ocean game plan introduced last year. The red ocean products are fast moving high-potential products, with ready consumer pull, such as butter, cheese and dark chocolates. Blue ocean products include those creating categories - cookies, rusks, shortbread, nankhatai, khakhra, gouda cheese, organic pulses, rice, flour and peanut spreads.
The company made information cards for 500 SKUs (ambient and chilled products), met 10,000 distributors in top 100 cities, and gave them the freedom to choose the card they wanted. While 200 cards went in the red ocean, the remaining 300 were placed in the blue ocean. Additional cards with product names have been handed to distributors to decide what would work best for their territories. Mumbai’s Jawahar Distributors, for example, picked 23 cards which included packs of 3 gm creamer, 140 gm tea mix, 100 gm shortbread, 3 cards of 200 gm butter nankhatai, 200 gm butter and chocolate cookies, six cards of single origin coffee drinks, Tru Lychee, 5 kg atta and six cards of 200 gm rusk and toast. Another Maharashtra distributor, Vardhaman, picked eight final cards which included dark passion chocolate, masti dahi and honey.
This was done to ensure that the scale of change wasn’t overwhelming, and to let distributors and retailers make informed choices.
Another facet of the new supply chain blitz is the dairy maker’s transition to palletised stock dispatches, such as stacking in honeycomb patterns, with space allocator tools enabling storage racking and stillages, increasing storage capacity by 30–50%. This is to reduce product damage, faster unloading at warehouses, quicker redistribution and better cash flow.
The Next Move: Amul is now casting its net wider. It wants to seep down to pin codes with a population as low as 5,000 and to go global to markets like the US via a partnership with the Michigan Milk Producers Association (MMPA) and the European Union. It is also introducing Amul milk packaged in Gambia, Ghana, Mozambique and Sierra Leone in Africa; France, Germany, Spain and Switzerland in the EU.
The Leader’s Voice
Jayen Mehta, managing director, Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (or Amul):
“There’s a method to the madness … to do such volume and velocity play. I know every product I launch has potential… the consumer is everywhere. The entire game is driven by the supply chain.”
“Blue Ocean products are already contributing sales of Rs 10 crore a month. It’s been a huge transformation experience, reduces the pressure on my legacy distributors and go-to-market is a lot smoother now.”
“We keep adding traffic to the highways. We are able to manage seasonality and much larger volumes this way. The products reach across general trade, modern trade, quick commerce, e-commerce, Amul shop and Amul parlours.”
“The general trade distributor has limitations. Retailers have limited space. The distributors decide what they want to keep. It’s not necessary that the retailer or distributor sells everything we have in our portfolio.”
The Big Move: Amul has unveiled a highly ambitious strategy that entails the launch of products in multiple categories at once, with the onus on its distribution muscle to make a success out of these products.
The Rollout: With a hundred new launches in the past 12 months, 1,200 packs of products (stock keeping units or SKUs) and 50-plus products, it is moving on from its storied near-eight-decade-old farmers-cooperative legacy built on milk, butter and cheese. Now the Amul brand includes products from protein shakes to frozen pizza, butter cookies to organic atta, kaju katli to blueberry yogurt, mashed potato to roti softener.
The Problem: Amul was churning out too many products and that was resulting in inconsistent availability. Viral Reddit discussion boards such as
#AmulPagalHoChukaHai (Amul has gone mad) exemplified this issue.
The Strategy: Let the channel decide what it wants to sell.
The Game Plan: Amul segregated all products into four distribution highways - ambient, chilled, fresh and frozen. Bolstering the highway strategy is Amul’s blue ocean and red ocean game plan introduced last year. The red ocean products are fast moving high-potential products, with ready consumer pull, such as butter, cheese and dark chocolates. Blue ocean products include those creating categories - cookies, rusks, shortbread, nankhatai, khakhra, gouda cheese, organic pulses, rice, flour and peanut spreads.
The company made information cards for 500 SKUs (ambient and chilled products), met 10,000 distributors in top 100 cities, and gave them the freedom to choose the card they wanted. While 200 cards went in the red ocean, the remaining 300 were placed in the blue ocean. Additional cards with product names have been handed to distributors to decide what would work best for their territories. Mumbai’s Jawahar Distributors, for example, picked 23 cards which included packs of 3 gm creamer, 140 gm tea mix, 100 gm shortbread, 3 cards of 200 gm butter nankhatai, 200 gm butter and chocolate cookies, six cards of single origin coffee drinks, Tru Lychee, 5 kg atta and six cards of 200 gm rusk and toast. Another Maharashtra distributor, Vardhaman, picked eight final cards which included dark passion chocolate, masti dahi and honey.
This was done to ensure that the scale of change wasn’t overwhelming, and to let distributors and retailers make informed choices.
Another facet of the new supply chain blitz is the dairy maker’s transition to palletised stock dispatches, such as stacking in honeycomb patterns, with space allocator tools enabling storage racking and stillages, increasing storage capacity by 30–50%. This is to reduce product damage, faster unloading at warehouses, quicker redistribution and better cash flow.
The Next Move: Amul is now casting its net wider. It wants to seep down to pin codes with a population as low as 5,000 and to go global to markets like the US via a partnership with the Michigan Milk Producers Association (MMPA) and the European Union. It is also introducing Amul milk packaged in Gambia, Ghana, Mozambique and Sierra Leone in Africa; France, Germany, Spain and Switzerland in the EU.
The Leader’s Voice
Jayen Mehta, managing director, Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (or Amul):
“There’s a method to the madness … to do such volume and velocity play. I know every product I launch has potential… the consumer is everywhere. The entire game is driven by the supply chain.”
“Blue Ocean products are already contributing sales of Rs 10 crore a month. It’s been a huge transformation experience, reduces the pressure on my legacy distributors and go-to-market is a lot smoother now.”
“We keep adding traffic to the highways. We are able to manage seasonality and much larger volumes this way. The products reach across general trade, modern trade, quick commerce, e-commerce, Amul shop and Amul parlours.”
“The general trade distributor has limitations. Retailers have limited space. The distributors decide what they want to keep. It’s not necessary that the retailer or distributor sells everything we have in our portfolio.”
