Nestlé India’s consumer-first, tech-first approach pays off

When Nestlé India MD Manish Tiwary took charge of the company last year, a question he often got asked was the biggest learning he brought from his earlier company, Amazon India. Not surprisingly, his answer was how to use technology more efficiently.  

“The last 10 years have been a good learning experience about how to use technology for things that are routine, which can be done by machines, using your valuable resources, and then deploying them in places where you need judgement. I am trying to infuse the role of technology in Nestlé India,” he had said in an interview with Fortune India.

Tiwary was clear that he would focus on generating volume growth as well as micro-segment consumers and launch specific products for these micro-segments. All this he had said would be done with the help of technology. This obviously needed change in mindsets as well as processes for the legacy FMCG company. Tiwary had cited the example of how it was making a host of innovations for iced tea brand, Nestea.

“We had been working on green tea for some time, and came up with variants of Nestea (for Gen Z and Gen Alpha). A typical process, from innovation to launching, could have taken 12 months. I gave them the freedom to change the approval system a bit and we launched products on quick commerce platforms in three months! If you go to Blinkit and search for Nestea, you will see three variants rated four-plus, among the healthiest green teas you can get in terms of sugar content," he said.

"How did we achieve that? We first changed processes; we said we needed to create small islands of innovation within a larger organisation so that these islands can move with speed. Once you achieve a certain scale, you can integrate into your main processes,” he explained.

It is close to 10 months since Tiwary has been MD of Nestlé India and the company has registered its highest growth in the last decade. Its total sales and domestic sales for Q4FY26 increased by 23.4% and 23.1%, respectively. In FY26, its total sales increased to ₹23,072 crore and it recorded a net profit of ₹3,545 crore. One of its key vectors of growth has been quick commerce. His strategy of bolder, bigger, and quicker innovations seems to have paid off.

Rural India has also contributed to Nestlé’s growth story this fiscal.

“In rural markets, we strengthened our route-to-market and accelerated reach expansion through a focused approach anchored on infrastructure, product portfolio, technology, visibility, consumer communication and people. This integrated approach delivered a strong scale-up in total reach across geographies, supporting the highest reach increase among industry peers, driven primarily by rural markets — expanding our presence to ~216,000 villages and sharpening the focus from adding outlets to improving the effectiveness of coverage and execution quality,” Tiwary said in a press release issued by the company.

His attention to rural actually got triggered by a presentation that was made to him during his orientation at the time of joining. The presentation said that Nestlé India’s revenue from rural was just 18%.

“In my earlier role in HUL, rural contributed 48%....as incomes grow, so do aspirations. Today, the kid in the village also wants to have Maggi. We have the right price-point packs to be able to serve them,” he had said in the interview with Fortune India in December last year.

Nestlé India’s performance in FY26 has been stellar and Tiwary has every reason to smile. But the road ahead won’t be a cakewalk. While the current geopolitical crisis is giving enough reasons to CEOs of India Inc to worry about, Tiwary has to be watchful of growing competition from its regional peers as well as from D2C brands.