Tata Consumer Products Ltd (TCPL) is looking to strengthen its distribution footprint both on the traditional and e-commerce platforms to aggressively grow its market share across its product portfolio.

The company, which has a strong presence in tea, coffee and food and beverages segment, will continue to launch more products, particularly in the health and wellness segment, N Chandrasekaran, Chairman, TCPL, said.

“We have significantly focused on strengthening both traditional distribution as well as e-commerce channel and you will see continuous strengthening happening (moving forward),” Chandrasekaran said, addressing shareholders at the company’s virtual Annual General Meeting on Friday.

According to the company’s annual report, the redesign of sales and distribution architecture and network has led to substantial enhancement of its reach in the country. While it rationalised its distributors, it also added over 30 per cent feet-on-street in the system and its direct outlet coverage increased by 30 per cent and numeric distribution went up by 15 per cent. The company is focussing on increasing its rural reach for which it now has 3x the number of territory sales officers and has already added over 2,000 rural distributors.

“Our dedicated, channel-specific sales teams cater to e-commerce, modern trade, institutions, and general trade. All these actions gave us more feet-on-street, enhanced reach, dedicated channel focus, better execution, lower cost-to-serve and improved service levels,” the company said.

Further, e-commerce accounted for around five per cent of its total sales in FY21, it said.

Drawing synergies

Having successfully integrated its food and beverages business in India, the company is already seeing the synergy benefits flowing in.

According to Chandrasekaran, Tata Group, which had embarked on a major transformation initiative under ‘One Tata’ by focusing on simplifying portfolio and reducing complexity by synergising operations and scaling its businesses through growth and consolidation, has been able to make a good progress across all aspects.

“At Tata Consumer Products, we have made significant progress in all these dimensions. The company has sharpened its focus on its key geographies and simplified its business model by exiting several non-core markets, and businesses,” he said and added that TCPL had exited from Sri Lanka, Russia and also from its non-core business in the US and Australia.

TCPL had recently acquired Kottaram Agro Foods (KAF), which is primarily engaged in the business of healthy breakfast cereals and millet-based snacks under the trademark Soulfull.

“It was a good acquisition and we will expand sales under this category through our distribution channel,” he said and added that the company would look at more such acquisitions in the future.

The company also has “lot of plans” in the healthy foods range including protein-based products. It would also look to add “fuel” to the portfolio of products under brand Sampann, which currently includes pulses and spices.

TCPL also plans to launch Eight O’Clock, America’s original gourmet coffee, in the direct-to-consumer (DTC) model next week.

While sales at Starbucks outlets has been severely impacted due to the pandemic, the company opened around 37 new stores in seven new cities during last year. The company would continue to invest and scale up the initiative, he said.

However, TCPL currently does not have any plans of scaling up its tea chain, Tata Cha and would rather focus on expansion of its product portfolio, he added.

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