Growth is a grift, usually. For the last three years, India’s consumer goods giants have been playing a high-stakes shell game with your grocery bill. They called it "value growth." In plain English, that means they sold you the same bottle of floor cleaner for 20% more, or—more likely—they kept the price at 50 rupees while quietly removing three cookies from the pack. It was growth by spreadsheet, fueled by a global supply chain that was on fire and inflation that made every trip to the market feel like a mugging.

But the winds have shifted. The bean-counters are bored with price hikes. Now, they want volume.

The narrative coming out of the latest quarterly earnings calls is remarkably consistent. Inflation is finally cooling its heels. The government is dangling GST cuts like a carrot in front of a tired horse. The result? A desperate, industry-wide pivot toward selling more actual stuff to more actual people. They aren’t just trying to squeeze another five rupees out of a tech worker in Mumbai; they’re trying to move truckloads of soap into the rural heartland.

It’s a volume-led bet. It’s also a gamble that the Indian consumer hasn't finally run out of patience.

Let’s look at the friction. For years, the trade-off was simple: pay more or get less. Now, companies like HUL and Adani Wilmar are staring at a different problem. Raw material costs—the stuff that actually goes into the vat, like palm oil and crude derivatives—have stabilized. This should be good news. But in the corporate world, stability is a crisis of its own. Without the excuse of "rising input costs" to justify price hikes, these firms have to actually grow the old-fashioned way. They have to convince someone who hasn't bought a premium detergent in two years that today is the day to upgrade.

Then there’s the GST factor. The government loves a good tax cut when an election cycle is looming or when the consumption data looks a bit thin. Lowering the tax bracket on essentials isn't just a gift to the shopper; it’s a subsidy for the marketing department. When the tax on a snack pack drops, the manufacturer has two choices: pass the savings to the customer or pocket the difference to fix their margins. Most do a bit of both and call it "strategic pricing."

The real battle isn't happening in the air-conditioned aisles of a suburban supermarket, though. It’s happening in the kirana stores.

Rural India has been the industry’s punching bag for a while. High inflation hit the villages hardest, where a five-rupee increase in the price of cooking oil isn't a rounding error—it’s a reason to skip a meal. Now, with the rural recovery supposedly "underway," the big players are flooding these zones with sachets. The sachet is the ultimate weapon of Indian capitalism. It’s a 2-rupee promise of a better life. But selling a billion sachets is a logistical nightmare compared to selling a million premium bottles. It requires a supply chain that can penetrate mud roads during a monsoon.

Enter the tech angle. You can’t talk about volume in 2024 without mentioning the "Quick Commerce" frenzy. Apps like Blinkit and Zepto have turned the "I need soap now" impulse into a multi-billion dollar pipeline. This is where the volume bet gets weird. In the cities, we aren't buying more because we need it; we’re buying more because it’s too easy to tap a button. The "dark store" at the end of your block is the new frontline. These companies are betting that if they can get a packet of Maggi to your door in seven minutes, you’ll buy ten packets a month instead of four.

But there’s a catch. There always is.

Volume growth is expensive. It requires massive spending on advertising to drown out the local brands that cropped up when the giants raised their prices too high. It requires "schemes"—those "Buy 3 Get 1 Free" stickers that are currently being slapped onto everything from tea bags to toothpaste. The margins are thinner than a cheap trash bag. If global oil prices spike because of a stray drone in the Middle East, or if the monsoon decides to take a year off, this whole volume-led dream evaporates.

The companies are confident, though. They have to be. They’ve spent the last three years telling investors that "premiumization" was the future. Now they’re sprinting back to the masses, hoping everyone forgot that they spent the pandemic making the cookies smaller.

It’s a pivot born of necessity, wrapped in the language of a "stronger economy." We’ll see how long the optimism lasts once the first quarter of stagnant wages hits the fan. After all, you can only sell so many sachets of shampoo to someone who’s wondering if they can still afford the water to rinse it out.

The trucks are moving. The warehouses are full. The prices are down, marginally. Now we wait to see if the Indian consumer actually wants to buy the hype, or if they’ve finally learned how to live with less.