Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL)

HUL demonstrates adaptive radiation identical to Darwin's finches, with one critical enhancement: the ability to rapidly create new species through product innovation. From the ancestral soap-selling organism that Lever Brothers established in 1888, HUL diversified into 200+ product variants across distinct micro-environments. The company evolved sachets (₹1 shampoo, ₹2 detergent) as specialized feeding structures for rural consumers with daily-wage incomes, Ayurvedic formulations incorporating neem and turmeric for traditional preference niches, and regional brands like Annapurna salt and Bru coffee as geographic subspecies. Project Shakti deployed 100,000+ rural women as a distributed reproductive system, reaching villages unreachable by conventional retail channels. This phenotypic plasticity enabled HUL to dominate across income strata, cultural segments, and distribution ecosystems simultaneously. With over 50 brands spanning 16 categories and serving 700 million consumers, HUL operates as a superorganism processing ₹64,243 crore in annual revenue. The 2025 demerger of ice cream brands into Kwality Wall's represents strategic pruning—shedding a low-margin appendage to concentrate metabolic resources on higher-return product families, demonstrating that even successful radiations require periodic autophagy.