The FMCG boardroom has seen an unusual amount of hulchul in the past one year. The latest news came from Colgate-Palmolive India, which announced that Prabha Narasimhan will move out of the MD & CEO role after four years to become Executive Vice President, Marketing, Asia-Pacific, while former Colgate executive Manish Anandani returns to the company as its new MD & CEO from September 28. The company described the move as part of its next growth phase, with Narasimhan’s new role taking her back into a marketing mandate at a regional level.
But this is just one of the several senior changes that hit India’s consumer companies in a relatively short period. HUL moved from Rohit Jawa to Priya Nair, Britannia saw Varun Berry replaced by Rakshit Hargave, Dabur split its India and global leadership responsibilities, Herjit Bhalla became India CEO while Mohit Malhotra moved to the global CEO role; GCPL moved from Sudhir Sitapati to Aasif Malbari, while Nestlé India had already brought Manish Tiwary into the Chairman and MD role. Wipro Consumer Care & Lighting also saw a change after Vineet Agrawal’s retirement, with Kumar Chander taking over.
However, the changes do not all tell the same story. Some are planned successions, some involve internal elevations and others have come earlier or more abruptly than expected. In fact, the recent Colgate announcement has drawn attention precisely for that. “Prabha’s term was supposed to end only in 2027. The contract was foreclosed,” reveals a senior industry professional. The movement comes before the end of her five-year term, although the company has positioned the transition as an elevation to a larger Asia-Pacific marketing role.
There has also been industry speculation around a few of the other recent exits and movements. “A lot can be read into the exit of Sudhir Sitapati and Rohit Jawa for sure,” the professional adds. And people familiar with the sector have questioned whether some of these changes reflect the broader reassessment of the businesses and the people running them.
Talking about Godrej Consumer, a market expert points out: “Sudhir Sitapati resigned four days after shareholders approved his reappointment to a fresh five-year term; shares fell 11.2%, their steepest drop in six years. The company’s own language ‘execution rigour,’ digital marketing, online sales and its choice of an internal CFO as successor said more than any commentary could. Making it clear that profitability, cost discipline and capital allocation now sit beside brand-building as non-negotiable.” He adds that HUL’s move from Rohit Jawa to Priya Nair in barely two years and Britannia’s shift from a thirteen-year veteran to an outsider underline how leadership expectations change with a company’s strategic phase.
However, these are industry-level observations rather than explanations confirmed by the companies.
Interestingly, a number of the leaders moving into these seats have spent significant parts of their careers in marketing, sales, consumer strategy or commercial roles, much like some of their predecessors. Priya Nair moved from global CMO and then President for the Beauty & Wellbeing portfolio at Unilever, into the HUL CEO role. Rakshit Hargave’s career spans marketing, sales and general management across consumer businesses. Herjit Bhalla has worked across Unilever, Metro Cash & Carry and Hershey in sales, marketing and operations. Manish Tiwary brings a combination of Unilever’s sales and marketing experience with his years leading Amazon India. Kumar Chander himself moved through sales and marketing before taking on broader business responsibilities.
Even the Colgate move offers an interesting twist. The outgoing CEO is not leaving the organisation. She is moving back into a marketing leadership role, while the incoming CEO brings three decades of experience across sales, marketing, general management and senior leadership. While these changes are taking place, the industry is actively trying to get back to stronger volume growth.
The growth story
The FMCG sector has not stopped growing in value; it is volume growth that has seen a material slowdown, particularly through 2025. Experts say muted urban demand and elevated inflation weighed heavily on consumption. 2026 showed early signs of a volume-led recovery among some of the large FMCG players after several quarters where growth was largely driven by inflation led price increases. What is interesting, however, is that the leadership churn began last year, well before this recovery could be sealed.
Wordpanel by Numerator’s MAT data shared with IMPACT, shows the volatility clearly: FMCG volume growth stood at 3.5% in June 2023, accelerated to 5.5% in June 2024, slipped to 3.9% in June 2025, and recovered to 5% by June 2026. The timing of the leadership changes raises the question: were boards already responding to a more fundamental shift in the FMCG growth equation before the recovery became visible?
At Hindustan Unilever, underlying sales growth fell to 2% in FY25 from 3% a year earlier, before recovering to 5% in FY26, supported by 4% underlying volume growth. Dabur’s revenue growth was subdued at 1.3% in FY25, before recovering to 5% in FY26. Britannia’s revenue grew 6.7% in FY26, while profit grew 16.3%, indicating that earnings rose considerably faster than the topline, which as per experts was the work of margin expansion as opposed to an increased demand.
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The exception
Then there is Marico, which offers a useful counterpoint to the wider discussion. The company recorded 26% revenue growth in FY26, its highest in 14 years, while its India business underlying volume growth reached 8%, a seven-year high.
But does that growth simply come from pushing its traditional portfolio harder? Well, maybe. But Marico had also been building new growth engines through acquisitions and newer businesses, including Beardo, Plix, True Elements and more recently, Cosmix. Its Foods and Premium Personal Care portfolios, including digital-first brands, contributed about 23% of India revenue in FY26, up from a much smaller base.
And though Marico represents this strategy at large, it is hardly alone among legacy consumer companies looking beyond their traditional portfolios for growth. HUL acquired a 90.5% stake in Minimalist, while Wipro Consumer Care & Lighting acquired TTK Healthcare’s Good Home and Eva brands for `256 crore. Nestlé, meanwhile, took a minority stake in Indian pet-food company Drools in 2025, which will give it additional exposure in the pet food category over and above Purina Petcare India which operates more in the premium range.
“Between coming up with an idea, researching it, putting a team together, testing the hypothesis and doing a test market, it’ll be a year and a half or two years for big traditional FMCG players. On the contrary at startups, these things happen much more quickly,” says Lloyd Mathias, Angel Investor and Independent Director explaining the reason why big FMCG conglomerates are acquiring smaller brands.
Why acquisitions?
Saurabh Parmar, Fractional CMO, believes FMCG companies may have misunderstood what really drives the success of D2C brands. “FMCG made a fundamental mistake. They looked at D2C’s success as a marketing and digital story. I believe it’s fundamentally a culture and consumer behaviour story,” he explains.
For instance, Brands such as Perfora identified an emerging demand for electric toothbrushes before Colgate responded adequately, while WholeTruth recognised the opportunity around healthier dark chocolate as health-conscious urban consumers changed their preferences. Parmar also points to coffee, where changing tastes have created space for newer propositions despite Nestlé’s category leadership.
In his view, these brands first understood where the Indian consumer was moving, while digital distribution and marketing simply gave them the means to scale that understanding quickly. Now, as these challenger brands have built sufficient consumer acceptance, large FMCG companies are acquiring them rather than spending years trying to develop the same propositions from within.
“In today’s rapidly changing world, speed is of essence. Very often being fast supercedes being perfect,” says Rajesh Ramakrishnan, Advisory consultant, Executive Coach, Author and ex-MD, Perfetti Van Melle India. He adds that acquiring smaller brands help large well-established brands to experiment and innovate and push boundaries which they may not be able to with the more established brands. A good example is TCPL acquiring Capital Foods which gave them instant access to a fast growing, high margin, niche opportunity. Acquisition makes sense if it offers you the advantage of time, new capability or high credibility.
But the acquisition story is not the solution to the larger volume slowdown problem. If anything, it illustrates the amount of reinvention that can be required to get beyond the limits of the traditional portfolio.
If we peruse the profitability numbers, Crisil estimates state that the FMCG operating profitability declined by 50-100 basis points in FY25, as input prices rose against muted demand. The slowdown, however, is not simply a story of consumers buying less. The more significant change is that the relationship between consumption, pricing and growth has been difficult to predict. FMCG companies can still report healthy value growth, but a greater part of that growth can come from pricing rather than volumes. Crisil expects organised FMCG players to grow revenues by 8-10% in FY27, but volume growth is likely to moderate to 2-3%.
This makes inflation particularly tricky for the sector. Companies have had to balance price increases against the risk of weakening already-sensitive demand, while consumers have responded by changing pack sizes and purchase patterns. Sanjay Trehan, Digital Strategy Advisor, points to this adjustment at the consumer level. “Rural consumers are hyper-sensitive to pricing, and hence, there you are seeing a trend of consuming smaller pack sizes. That has led to a reduction in volume demand.”
The pressure is not confined to the consumer’s wallet. Geopolitical volatility has made the cost side harder to manage as well. Mathias attributes part of the slowdown to the uncertainty of the past 18 months, particularly geopolitical tensions and volatile oil prices. He points to the Ukraine war, the more recent Israel-Iran-US conflict and oil prices, which rose to $120 and continue to hover around $80-90. “That’s been the big concern. A lot of companies, brands and people have pushed back on spending or at least, are held back on luxury expenses.” Companies need to protect margins at precisely the time when raising prices can make volume growth harder to sustain.
But inflation alone does not explain the slowdown. Anjana Ghosh, Managing Director, Scale Sherpas, former CEO of Xotik Frujas Pvt. Ltd and ex-Director of Bisleri argues that consumers have not necessarily stopped consuming. What has changed is what they are willing to prioritise. “Consumers have become much more selective in where they spend. Even when inflation increases, they do not necessarily reduce overall consumption, they simply reprioritise spending.”
That reprioritisation is making the FMCG basket more fragmented. A consumer may trade down on a routine purchase while spending more on products that promise health, convenience or better efficacy. This is why premiumisation and value-seeking can exist at the same time. The challenge for established brands is then, not to make a product simply affordable, but to give consumers a reason to choose it over a wide set of alternatives.
The GST impact 
Then there is GST, which needs some nuance in this discussion. The September 2025 rationalisation brought several everyday FMCG categories, including soaps, shampoos and a range of packaged foods, down to the 5% tax slab. But the transition was not immediate or smooth. Suumit Kapoor, Brand Growth Consultant points to short-term disruption as companies adjusted prices, inventory and supply chains. Dabur flagged a temporary sales impact, while Godrej Consumer Products saw India volume growth move from 3% to 8% and then, 9% over the next two quarters
Rural India, traditionally the sector’s volume cushion, is also becoming a more complicated growth story. It would be too simplistic to call this a rural demand collapse. In fact, rural markets continued to grow faster than urban markets through late 2025, although the gap narrowed, with rural volume growth at 2.9% against 2.3% in urban markets. The issue is that the rural consumer is becoming more price-sensitive at a time when the competitive landscape around them is changing.
“Rural India’s growth has become less of a steady slope and more of a pulse,” says Kapoor. He points to research from NielsenIQ which recorded rural volume growth at 9.9% in the December 2024 quarter, up from 5.7% in the previous quarter. Rural continued to outpace urban growth into the following quarter. Yet the wider FMCG picture remained more dependent on value than volume, with 13.9% value growth against 6% volume growth, suggesting that price was still doing more of the work than demand.
The competitive picture is changing too. Kapoor points to smaller FMCG companies outgrowing large listed peers through 2025, suggesting that the issue is not simply whether rural demand exists, but who is better positioned to capture it. Kapoor, citing Emkay Research, points to smaller FMCG companies outgrowing large listed peers through 2025. Patanjali, for instance, entered Worldpanel by Numerator’s top 12 most-chosen FMCG brands in 2026 on double-digit growth, even as the household reach of a longstanding category leader declined.
The distribution network
Earlier, a large FMCG company could lean heavily on its distribution network to establish presence across markets. Today, distribution is still an advantage, but it is no longer an impregnable moat. GST has helped create a more unified national market, Mathias argues. “In the past, the large companies that have deep distribution pockets, were solid. Now, that has diminished quite considerably,” he says, pointing to third-party logistics like e-commerce and quick commerce and newer channels that allow smaller brands to reach consumers much faster.
Quick commerce has exponentially accelerated the move. NIQ’s latest data shows e-commerce accounting for 18% of FMCG sales in India’s top eight metros, with quick commerce contributing more than three-fourths of e-commerce FMCG sales. It is not simply another place to sell. Trehan sees this as a change in the portfolio equation too. “Quick Commerce also has played a role in this. It has rewritten the distribution game and is forcing the companies to optimise their SKUs.”
Ashish Bajaj, Founder, 10on10Foods, who earlier worked as a marketer in the industry shares, “Quick commerce is changing FMCG distribution from being primarily a supply-chain conversation to becoming a much more immediate consumer interaction.” For emerging brands, that is significant as they no longer have to wait to build an extensive physical retail network before reaching urban consumers. More importantly, it is creating a faster test-and-learn environment. Sharing his personal experience, Bajaj says, “For us at 10on10Foods, we worked with one Q-commerce, launching 10 products as per their insights and within 60 days, we had our clear winners, shut down the rest and with clarity. Was this ever possible earlier?”
What emerges then, is a less of a single demand problem than a market that has become structurally harder to win. Darshana Shah, Brand & CX Strategist and Founder, Darshana Shah Advisory & Consulting, sees the bigger shift as a change in the nature of the FMCG business itself. “FMCG has become a much more complex business than it was a decade ago. Growth is no longer simply about increasing distribution, penetration and volumes,” she says. Consumers have more choices, regional and challenger brands are stronger, and digital and quick commerce have changed how products are discovered and bought. The challenge, she argues, is now “not just to grow, but to find quality growth that can sustain itself.”
And that may also explain the changing profile of the people being put in charge. When the problem is no longer simply how to sell more of an existing portfolio, the value of understanding what consumers will want next becomes harder to separate from the broader business agenda.
The future
Kapoor offers a really nuanced view here. Priya Nair’s first earnings call as HUL’s CEO outlined four priorities: radically segment consumers, modernise core brands, transform marketing and sales, and drive online discovery. What is notable is what does not appear as a standalone priority: manufacturing efficiency, working capital or supply-chain restructuring. Not because these have become less important, but because they are increasingly table stakes rather than differentiators.
Hence, India’s FMCG boardrooms are not simply reshuffling names; they are rewiring what leadership itself must mean. A lot of FMCG giants have changed leaders within roughly a year. Boards aren’t chasing outsider disruption; they’re recalibrating what the top job now demands.
The modern FMCG CEO, experts add, must combine consumer instinct with commercial judgment, digital fluency, portfolio economics and organisational transformation, while boards simultaneously demand growth, margin, innovation and quarterly delivery, goals that rarely pull in the same direction. The CEO is no longer managing a company. The CEO is managing contradictions.
That being the case, not necessarily have the boards decided that marketers make better CEOs. It is that consumer understanding has moved closer to the centre of the business problem. But, the deeper risk could also be boards falling for their own solutionism, mistaking a new face for a new system, adds an industry expert. No CEO can alone rewrite category economics or distribution structures. Changing leaders faster than the operating model beneath them only trades stability for discontinuity.
