India is the largest milk producer contributing 23% of global milk production. Annual milk production in the country has grown by 6.4% (CAGR) in the past 5 years. Dairy is a high priority sector for Government of India due to its socio-economic significance. It is the single largest agricultural commodity contributing 5% of the national economy and employing 80 Mn+ farmers directly. Further, the country boasts a large domestic packaged dairy products of market worth Rs. 2.7-3.0 lakh crore witnessing a strong double-digit growth.
The market growth in Dairy requires support of significant infrastructure investment across processing, chilling, logistics, cattle feed etc. Further, lucrative untapped opportunities exist in areas such as value-added dairy products, organic/ farm fresh milk and exports. The Dairy sector has seen substantial foreign direct investment (FDI) constituting about 40% of FDIs Indian food sector. To facilitate the infrastructure growth, Central/ State Governments have released various incentives to attract investments in this sector.
Milk is considered one of the most nutritious intakes that a person can have and is primarily the only source for nutrition for babies at the beginning. Milk also can be consumed in various forms such that it can be drunk directly, used to add flavors in certain dishes, utilized to make desserts and is a core ingredient for other dairy products.
India at present is the world’s largest milk producer and its production rate is only growing by 35.61 per cent during the last six years to 198.4 million tonnes in 209-20. Apart from its consumption value, Milk also creates livelihood. Around 80 million rural households are engaged in milk production, mostly the landless, and small farmers. Milk contributes close to 1/3rd of the gross income of rural households.
we will look at some leading Indian startups that are delivering milk straight from the farm
Country Delight
Started in 2015 by Chakradhar Ghade and Nitin Kaushal, Country Delight claims to offer natural, fresh and unadulterated milk directly to the doorstep of the consumer. Consumer ordering and servicing happens through a mobile application. It launched with selling milk and has since expanded to other dairy products, such as curd, eggs, ghee, bread, etc, and even staples. The startup has to date raised Series C funding and is backed by Matrix Partners, Orios Partners, Elevation Capital, among others. The Bengaluru-based startup claims to source Milk from farms within a 150-200 km radius and delivers it within 24-36 hours from the time of collection.
The startup currently serves 1.5 lakh households.
Stellapps
Founded by Ranjith Mukundan, Praveen Nale, Ramkrishna Adukuri and Venkatesh Seshayee in 2011, Stellapps is a farm-to-consumer dairy digitization service provider. The startup leverages Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, cloud, data analytics among others to improve dairy supply chain parameters, including milk production, milk procurement, cold chain, animal insurance, and farmer payments.
The startup’s clients are most of the major private and cooperative diaries and it is helping in digitizing around 10 million liters worth $3.4 million every day. The startup is backed by venture debt fund Stride Ventures.
Milk Mantra
Founded by Srikumar along with Rashima Mishra in 2009, this Odisha-based startup has been delivering an array of packaged dairy products such as milk, lassi, curd, buttermilk, paneer, milk shakes, among others. The startup processing plants are in Konark and Sambalpur and claims to be a leading dairy brand in Eastern India. The startup has raised $25 million in venture capital funding over four rounds from Eight Roads, Neev Fund and Aavishkar VC. Milk Mantra’s revenues have scaled from $2 million in 2013 to $32 million in 2020 and are now reaching more than 300,000 households every day. The startup’s farmers have now grown to more than 60,000.
Milkbasket
Established in 2015 by Ashis Goel, Yatish Talavdia, Anant Goel and Anurag Jain, Milkbasket is one of the leading players in the daily grocery delivery segment. The startup has identified that milk attracts customers to buy other products, hence the name Milk Basket, where a customer can get milk and other essential products delivered at their doorsteps. The startup has raised close to $40 million in funding and is backed by Inflection Point Ventures, Kalaari Capital, Blume Ventures, Mayfield India, among others
Puresh Daily
IIM graduate Manish Piyush, who worked in 14 countries in senior positions, came back to his home state Jharkhand to solve a basic problem — access to chemical-free milk. Manish joined hands with his childhood friend Aditya Kumar to start the milk subscription app Puresh Daily Foods in 2019. The Ranchi-based startup provides organic cow milk and chemical-free dairy products.
Since its launch, Puresh is now selling over 1,000 litres of milk every day, has over 1,500 customers, and is seeing profits. Since milk is an essential item, Puresh saw a 100 percent jump in its revenue during the coronavirus lockdown, says Manish.
Whyte Farms
A quest for healthy and pure cow’s milk led Kanika Yadav to be a dairy farmer and start Whyte Farms, a dairy startup clocking revenue in crores today. She started the Delhi-based startup along with co-founder Sanjeev Yadav in 2015.
The Delhi-based entrepreneur says she grew up drinking pure cow’s milk from cattle at home till she was 28 years old. However, Kanika’s family had to give away the cattle at home in Rajokri, Delhi in 2014 when she was working as a progressive educator. Whyte Farms claims to be the healthier alternative, with all the processes from chilling, pasteurising, and packaging taking place at its 30-acre farm in Tijara, located 90 km from Delhi.
Packaged in glass bottles, the milk is delivered to more than 3,000 households within 8 to 12 hours of the cows being milked, without the help of any external agency.
SRC Farms
Hooghly-based SRC Farms is attempting to set an example in the dairy space by taking special care of its cattle’s health, comfort, and nutrition.
Founded by Harsh Bihani, Indranil Sen, Uma Shankar Rathi, and Ashok Chandak in 2012, the dairy farm is known for its fully mechanised, safe milk extraction, storage processes, and its environmentally sound and animal-friendly engagements.
One of its technological intervention, DelPro, records data, including the yield given by each animal, date of pregnancy, and time of vaccination of the cattle, and other details regarding everyday milking and feeding.
The cows at SRC Farms are milked about thrice a day using machines driven by vacuum and pulsation without any human intervention. Once this is complete, the milk is automatically transferred to a bulk cold storage facility of four degrees Celsius.
In fact, to promote and use a clean and renewable source of energy, SRC Farms assembled a biogas plant in 2018. All the cow dung generated in the farm is fed into the plant as an input. The resultant biogas energy is used to electrify the farm.
Prompt Equipments Pvt Ltd
Operation Flood transformed India from a milk deficient nation to the world’s largest milk producing nation, surpassing the US in 1997-98.
As the sector was still in its nascent stage in the early 90s, Ahmedabad-based PN Mehta realised there was scope for growth with technology adaptation.
Mehta was already into portable electric power tools manufacturing, a business he started in 1978, and so foraying into dairy tech was not as cumbersome, and in 1992, Prompt Equipments Pvt Ltd was born.
His son and second-generation entrepreneur Shridhar Mehta recalls that in 1995, the company launched the Automatic Milk Collection System, followed by Fat’omatic — a fully automatic milk fat measuring machine in 1999. In 2009, Prompt partnered with a Russian company that provided technology based on ultrasonics to launch a milk analyser that measured features like — fat, density, Solid-Not-Fat (SNF), and the amount of water added in the milk. The dairy sector greatly appreciated this new technology as Shridhar says it helped farmers identify clean milk.
In 2009, Prompt partnered with a Russian company that provided technology based on ultrasonics to launch a milk analyser that measured features like — fat, density, Solid-Not-Fat (SNF), and the amount of water added in the milk. The dairy sector greatly appreciated this new technology as Shridhar says it helped farmers identify clean milk.
Leading Organic Milk Startups in India
India is the world’s largest milk producer, with about 22 percent share of global milk production. However, around 68.7 percent of milk and milk products sold in the country do not meet standards laid down by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI). Adulteration in milk is also an age-old ongoing problem in India. In recent times, a number of startups have come-up across the breadth of the country that solve the quality issue with milk. Many of these startups stress not only on the adulteration free milk but also stress about the feed given to cattle. Let us look at the organic milk startups in India:
- Happy Milk
In December 2017, Mehal Kejriwal co-founded Happy Milk, which now has its own farm on the outskirts of Bengaluru with around 400 cows. Happy Milk serves individual buyers, stores like Nature’s Basket, Foodhall to name a few, it even takes bulk orders. It has monthly subscriptions through apps like Daily Ninja, Doodhwala and Amazon Prime Now.
Happy Milk partnered with German technology company, Gea, that designed its farm aspects like from where the milking parlour should be, to the location of the calves, the packaging process, pasteurising and homogenising expertise and other processes. Gea also helped Happy Milk fit a monitoring device, similar to a Fitbit wearable, on the cows at the farm. At Happy Milk farms, the fodder is grown organically (free from pesticides and insecticides). They have detailed diet charts for the cows which include about 11-odd food nutrients that result in a healthy, complete diet to ensure good quality milk.
- The Milk India Company
Founded by Shilpi Sinha in 2018, the Milk India Company delivers raw and unpasteurised cow milk. Currently delivering to 600 families in Bengaluru, the startup boasts of pure cow milk, which comes raw, unpasteurised with zero adulteration & zero processing involved , certified by National Dairy Research Institute of India.
The Milk India Company delivers cow milk every morning at the customer’s doorstep in glass bottles. Bootstrapped with an initial investment of Rs 11,000 the startup has clocked an annual revenue of Rs 27 lakh and Rs 70 lakh in the first two years of operation, respectively.
- Matratva Dairy
IIM-Kolkata alumnus, Ankita Kumawat left a corporate job in the US to start dairy farming in Rajasthan’s Ajmer district in 2014. The startup procures milk from indigenous cow breeds like Gir, Sahiwal, Tharaparkar, and Rathi, and relies on traditional methods with minimum machine intervention to A2 milk and its products – ghee, butter, sweets, and buttermilk.
Now sold under Ankita’s Goratan Products brand, their products are available on platforms like Amazon and BigBasket as well.
- Klimom
Klimom is a brand of India Gir cow milk, fresh from the farm to your home. Their farms are located at Sangareddy, Hyderabad. Founded by an engineering graduate and mother of two, Allola Divya Reddy, who did not want to feed her children adulterated milk and decided to start her own dairy farm that evolved into Klimom Wellness and Farm in 2015.
She has also received the National Gopal Ratna Award from the Government of India, also sells ghee and A2 milk-based desserts like rasagulla, gulab jamun, srikhand, and basundi.
- Milk Mantra
Milk Mantra is an Indian agricultural dairy products startup based in Odisha. Founded in August 2009 by former director at Tetley Srikumar Misra and first operational in 2012, Milk Mantra was set up to solve the milk scarcity problem in the state.
Milk Mantra produces and distributes milk and other milk-based products like buttermilk, cottage cheese, curd, and yogurt. It also sells flavored milkshakes and ready-to-drink healthy milk beverages under its brands Milky Moo and Mooshake. It is known for its packaging that increases the shelf life of milk products by up to four days.
The Department of Animal Husbandry & Dairying (DAHD), Government of India, with a view to provide dedicated focus towards promoting & facilitating investments in the Indian Dairy sector, has setup Dairy Investment Accelerator under its Investment Facilitation Cell. This Investment Accelerator is a cross functional team constituted to serve as the interface with investors. It shall provide support across the investment cycle:
- Offering specific inputs for evaluation of investment opportunities
- Addressing queries about application to govt. schemes
- Connecting with strategic partners
- Providing on-ground assistance with state departments & relevant authorities
Further, the Dairy Investment Accelerator will work with DAHD to organize a series of events with global & local industry participants and one-on-one discussions with the investors to understand their perspectives, facilitate direct interactions with government officials and connects with other players in the industry.
Dairy Investment Accelerator is also generating awareness among investors about Animal Husbandry Infrastructure Development fund (AHIDF). AHIDF is one of the flagship schemes by DAHD, Government of India whereby Rs. 15,000 crore fund has been setup for offering financial support to entrepreneurs, private companies, MSME, Farmers Producers Organizations (FPOs), and Section 8 companies.
Eligible entities can avail the benefits of the scheme to set up new units or expand existing units in areas of dairy processing & related value addition infrastructure, meat processing & related value addition infrastructure and Animal Feed Plant. The benefits available are:
- 3% interest subvention on loans
- 2-year moratorium with 6-year repayment period
- INR 750 Cr credit guarantee
The DAHD encourages all the private companies, individual entrepreneurs, and start-ups, who are interested in investing in Dairy sector, to reach out to the Dairy Investment .
https://www.pashudhanpraharee.com/how-digital-start-ups-are-transforming-indian-dairy-farming/
