Hyderabad: In a path-breaking tie-up, two fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) leaders, Hindustan Lever (HLL) and Pepsi Foods, have formed an alliance in India to jointly market, through a vending format, a full range of hot beverages and soft drinks from their portfolio of world-class brands.

HLL brings to the alliance a well-established presence and brand value in hot beverages, outstanding product development and backward integrated sourcing capability, expertise in vending and an extensive institutional channel base.

Pepsi has strong brands, rich expertise in on-premise retailing of cold beverages, extensive sales and distribution infrastructure, and a well-developed network of retail outlets and dealers who sell Pepsi through fountain machines.

The partnership leverages each other’s strengths with an unbeatable business model that creates a powerful distribution base to market a unified portfolio of popular hot beverages and soft drinks through a combined fountain, vending and institutional initiative.

The area of collaboration for these two organisations will be in vending hot tea and coffee along with soft drinks across India. The alliance will make available leading brands of the two FMCG giants, Lipton, Taj Mahal, Bru, Pepsi Cola, 7Up, Mirinda, and other popular carbonated soft drinks through vending machines and fountains.

With this alliance, HLL and Pepsi venture into offering hot beverages through the Pepsi distribution system for the first time in the country as part of their strategy to infuse new growth in the entire category of liquid refreshment beverages.

In addition to the plain variety, hot tea will be available in cardamom, diet cardamom, ginger and masala flavours, while hot coffee will have three varieties: pure, cappuccino and mochaccino.

Says PepsiCo India Holdings chairman Rajeev Bakshi: “The unprecedented alliance will leverage the extensive sales and distribution network of both these companies that complement each other to deliver an expanded portfolio and unbeatable value for the benefit of our consumers and customers.”