Amul plans to spread parlour network

The Rs 2,500 crore (Rs 25 billion) plus Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation is expanding its parlours under its brand 'Amul' across the country. The homegrown desi brand will soon showcase its first parlour in the city.

A senior official with GCMMF said that "we are expanding our chain of parlours across the country so that the customers can have a choice of a wide range of Amul product." However, he refused to divulge investment details.

Amul currently operates over 50 outlets in its hometown in Gujarat and has a few outlets in Delhi and Hyderabad. The new parlours will offer customers the entire range of Amul products.

Besides parlours, the co-operative has also tied up with corporates such as Infosys' campus in Bangalore, Tatas, Reliance and Hindustan Petroleum Corporation.

The range of products include ice creams, butter, cheese, pizzas, gulab jamuns, sugar confectionery among others.

The co-operative is slowly moving towards transforming itself into a food conglomerate and it is sprucing up its infrastructure for the purpose.

Meanwhile, the co-operative has recently relaunched its Amul brand of chocolates in the market. It is also foraying in branded sugar and plans are afoot to enter the market with one kilogram packs of branded sugar.

The National Federation of Cooperative Sugar Factories has approached the co-operative to undertake marketing operation of its member factories.

In fact, the federation has tied up with Gujarat Co-operative to avail latter's wide marketing network involving more than 3,000 distributors and over 500,000 retailers spread across the country.

It has also been test marketing Amul soups-unlike the aluminium packaging of soups by rivals such as Nestle or HLL-Amul offerings come in tetrapacks and consumers have to pour the contents of the pack, heat and sip.

Swiss multinational Nestle is the leader in the soup category with its Maggi brand, followed by Knorr of Hindustan Lever.

Along with the new strategies, Amul is also coming up with new ice creams offerings and will be launching the products in the market soon.