?Nissin Foods to distribute FCL products at retail outlets
?Nissin Foods to distribute FCL products at retail outlets

Future Group, one of the pioneers of organised retailing in India, has found the right ingredients in the inventor of Asian snack-food staples to serve up a tasty treat beyond its bailiwick – at street-corner groceries across the country.

Future Consumer (FCL) that sells its own brands of snacks, cookies and other packaged foods at its Big Bazaar and Easy Day stores, will harness the distribution muscle of the Indian unit of Japan's Nissin Foods to reach out to buyers beyond the 800-odd own outlets that currently stock FCL products. The arrangement is a novelty in India, where about two decades of organised retailing have failed to erode the dominance of neighbourhood grocers in the USD600-billion-a-year market.

The Indo-Nissin distribution tie-up, therefore, dovetails into Future Group founder Kishore Biyani's wider strategy to generate Rs 20,000 crore in sales from in-house brands by 2021 and establish itself as a standalone consumer-goods company by enhancing the brand recall of its private labels. The latest initiative will turn the Future Group into a direct rival of HUL, ITC, and Nestle, marquee consumer goods companies whose products dominate the retail shelves at Biyani’s stores.

Devendra Chwala, CEO, FCL, said, "We are taking our products and brands to local general trade which accounts for nearly three-fourth of the overall FMCG sales. The scale of our reach will now match the large portfolio that we have created over the last decade."

 
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