A kirana owner runs out of stock on a Saturday evening, the busiest hour of the week. Twenty years ago, he called his distributor and waited. Today, in a growing number of Indian towns, he opens an app, places the order himself, and gets it the next morning. What the distributor took several days to respond to back then, an algorithm wraps up really quickly in the day and age we live.
This shift is now well underway across India’s FMCG and beverage supply chains, and the numbers behind it are hard to ignore.
From order books to algorithms
Hindustan Unilever’s Shikhar platform started as a basic digital ordering tool for retailers. It has since turned into something far bigger. In 2025, the company added generative AI to the platform, letting retailers turn a single product photo into a promotional video, free of cost. Shikhar has evolved into one of the country’s largest digital retail networks. In select cities, its re-engineered warehouse system, called Samadhan, gets orders to retailers by the next day.
That one detail matters more than it sounds. A retailer who used to wait two or three days for restock now waits for one. For a small shop with limited shelf space and even more limited cash, that is the difference between a sale made and a sale lost to the store next door.
The company has followed a similar digital distribution approach in other markets as well, using cloud-based B2B platforms to connect retailers, distributors and field sales teams while improving order management and supply chain visibility.
Beverages have their own version
Coca-Cola India runs a comparable system called Coke Buddy, giving kirana retailers a self-ordering platform while helping streamline interactions with the company’s sales network. The Coca-Cola bottling system is also leveraging AI to strengthen field sales and retail execution. AI-powered sales assistants generate intelligent suggested orders for field sales representatives based on sales trends, outlet potential, inventory levels and demand patterns.
At the retail level, AI-enabled image recognition technology captures real-time data from retail coolers, automatically identifying available brands and pack sizes. This gives sales teams better visibility into what is happening across outlets, helping them respond faster to demand and improve retail execution. That single change, from reactive to real-time, is what separates a modern distribution network from an old one.
The harder problem is forecasting, not ordering
Taking orders faster is the easy part. Knowing what to stock before the order even comes in is the harder, more valuable problem, and it is where Indian FMCG still has real ground to cover. Over 80% of FMCG volume in India still moves through general trade with almost no digital visibility into what is selling where. Industry estimates put the annual cost of this blind spot, in stock-outs and excess inventory combined, at tens of thousands of crores. AI adoption in supply chain planning is growing at over 30% a year, but most companies are still figuring out how to use it properly.
For a bottler, this is not an abstract efficiency exercise. Beverage demand swings hard with the weather and the calendar. It spikes in a heatwave, drops in the monsoon, and spikes again around festivals. A forecasting system that reads these swings and adjusts replenishment on its own does one very simple thing well: it keeps the right drink cold and in stock when someone actually wants it.
What doesn’t change
The distributor-retailer relationship built over decades on trust and proximity is not going anywhere, and none of this technology is trying to replace it. What it does is take the guesswork out of that relationship. Sales staff spend less time chasing orders and more time solving problems. Retailers get answers in seconds instead of promises for tomorrow. The companies treating this as core infrastructure, not a side project, are the ones that will still be reaching the last shop in the last lane, reliably, a few festival seasons from now.
This article is authored by Paritosh Ladhani. He is Joint Managing Director, SLMG Beverages Private Limited. All views in this article are of the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Logistics Insider.
