The ₹1,00,000 Crore War: How Ambani Is Rewriting the FMCG Playbook

For nine decades, Hindustan Unilever owned the Indian kitchen. Now, Reliance is buying the grocery store. A data-driven analysis of the most consequential FMCG battle of our generation.

Picture a kirana owner in Nagpur — call him Ramesh — who has stocked Surf Excel, Lux, and Horlicks since his father opened the shop in 1987. Last quarter, a Reliance field rep offered him a margin structure he'd never seen before: better returns, faster replenishment, and doorstep delivery in 24 hours. Ramesh didn't switch because he stopped believing in HUL. He switched because the maths changed.

That is precisely what Reliance Consumer Products Limited (RCPL) is engineering — not a battle for minds, but a battle for margins, infrastructure, and the invisible data that links what a billion Indians want to what lands on their shelves.

 

1.  The Numbers Behind the Ambition

RCPL's financial trajectory reads less like a startup and more like a controlled detonation. Backed by the towering scale of Reliance Retail Ventures Limited (RRVL) — which posted a turnover of over ₹3,30,000 crore in FY 2024-25 — the consumer products arm has capital runway that HUL can only observe from a distance.

₹11,450 Cr RCPL Revenue (FY 2024-25) — just the second year of full operations

₹5,065 Cr Q3 FY26 Quarterly Revenue — 60% YoY growth — not a blip, a trajectory

₹8,000 Cr Planned CapEx in Beverages — 10–12 new manufacturing plants across India

To put the 60% quarterly growth in context: HUL, in its most recent results, reported volume growth in the low single digits. When one player is growing at 60% and another at 3%, the competitive geometry of the market is being redrawn in real time.

"RCPL is not a startup anymore. At ₹11,450 crore in Year 2, it is already a mid-cap FMCG company. The question is no longer if it becomes a threat — it is how fast."

 

2.  The 'Trojan Horse' Strategy: Buying Nostalgia, Licensing the Globe

Reliance's brand-building playbook is not the conventional one. While most FMCG challengers spend years building equity from scratch, RCPL has taken a faster route: acquire the emotional memory of existing brands and deploy them at scale through its own pipes.

Consider Campa Cola. When Reliance relaunched it in 2022, the brand had been dormant for nearly two decades. But every 40-plus consumer in India had a Campa memory. Reliance didn't need to build a brand — it reactivated one, then priced it ₹10 below Coke and Pepsi to trigger a mass trial. The playbook was elegant in its simplicity: nostalgia as the hook, price as the hammer.

The global rights acquisitions — Brylcreem, Toni & Guy, Matey, Badedas — follow a similar logic. These are not vanity buys. They are category entry tickets into hair care, personal care, and bath segments where HUL's Dove and Sunsilk have dominated for decades. And in late 2025, RCPL launched Waggies in the pet care segment — a market growing at 20%+ annually and virtually uncontested in the value tier.

The Independence brand, meanwhile, is quietly becoming a household staple in atta, pulses, and edible oils — categories with enormous volume but razor-thin margins for everyone except the player who owns the supply chain. Reliance does.

 

3.  Distribution: When the Shelf IS the Strategy

Legacy FMCG is built on a simple principle: get your product onto as many shelves as possible, and the consumer will find it. Reliance has inverted this. It doesn't just want shelf space — it wants to own the shelves themselves.

19,979 Reliance Retail Stores (Dec 2025) — added 2,600+ stores in FY25 alone

77.4 Mn sq. ft. Total Retail Area — the largest physical retail footprint in India

1.6 Mn Quick Commerce Daily Orders — 2nd largest q-comm player in India

The quick commerce number deserves particular attention from an investor standpoint. Reaching 1.6 million daily orders puts Reliance in direct competition with Blinkit and Zepto — but with one structural advantage: the products being delivered are increasingly Reliance's own. When JioMart delivers Independence atta to a household in Pune in 12 minutes, there is no distributor margin, no third-party retailer cut, and no competing brand placement on the shelf. The entire value chain is Reliance's.

For HUL and Nestlé, this is the scenario that keeps CFOs awake. Their products rely on neutral distribution. Reliance's platform is, by design, not neutral.

 

4.  The Invisible Edge: Data as a Competitive Moat

In traditional FMCG, consumer insight comes from expensive, lagged market research — surveys, Nielsen panels, focus groups conducted months before a campaign launches. Reliance operates in a different temporal reality.

450 Mn+ Jio Monthly Active Users — across digital ecosystem

515 Mn Jio Subscribers — the largest telecom base in India

When a Jio subscriber streams a cricket match, buys groceries on JioMart, pays for it on JioFinance, and recharges through the Jio app, Reliance captures a 360-degree consumption portrait that no FMCG company — including HUL — can independently construct. This is the 'closed-loop' data advantage, and it is genuinely unprecedented in the Indian market.

The practical implication for RCPL: it can identify the precise 'switch point' — the price, bundle, or context that causes a loyal Surf Excel buyer to drop to a Reliance detergent brand for the first time. Once that threshold is known at population scale, it can be engineered with surgical precision across 515 million potential customers.

"HUL has brand memory. Reliance has real-time behavior data on half a billion people. In a digital-first retail world, those are not equivalent assets."

 

 

5.  The Counter-Attack: HUL Climbs the Pyramid

HUL is not standing still, and it would be an analytical error to dismiss the incumbent. Its counter-strategy has two legs: premiumize where Reliance can't follow, and digitize the kirana network before Reliance captures it.

On premiumization: HUL is doubling down on Dove, Lakmé, and its wellness portfolio — categories where brand equity commands a genuine premium and where value-priced alternatives struggle to convince consumers. A woman who trusts Lakmé for her skin is not easily converted by a cheaper private label. This is the segment of the market where 90 years of brand investment still counts.

On kirana digitization: HUL's Shikhar app now connects over 14 lakh retailers. Orders are AI-assisted, and delivery lead times have been compressed to 24 hours. The intent is transparent — make it so seamless for a kirana to work with HUL that switching to Reliance's B2B platform requires genuine effort. Loyalty, in this context, is an engineering problem.

The challenge for HUL is that premiumization is a defensive retreat, not an offensive counter. Moving upmarket concedes the mass market — exactly where Reliance is most aggressively expanding.

 

 

The Adwise Take

What is unfolding in Indian FMCG is not a conventional product war. It is a collision between two fundamentally different models of competitive advantage — one rooted in brand trust built over generations, the other in infrastructure, capital, and data accumulated in a decade.

HUL owns mindshare. Reliance owns the pipes through which that mindshare gets converted into a purchase.

For investors, the key watch variables are straightforward: RCPL's quarterly revenue trajectory (60% YoY growth must sustain or accelerate to justify the ₹8,000 crore capex bet), HUL's volume growth in mass categories (any acceleration suggests Reliance's push is being absorbed; any further deceleration is a signal), and the pace at which Reliance's private labels gain share of basket on JioMart and Reliance Fresh.

The ₹20 lakh crore FMCG market is large enough for multiple winners. But the rules of winning are being rewritten — and the author is Mukesh Ambani.