The Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF), which sells products under India’s largest dairy brand Amul, intends to focus on Indian sweets with a pipeline of new product launches.
For this, Amul has set up a new production line in Surat in Gujarat. Further, it has plans to start production plants in Mumbai, Delhi, and Kolkata for Indian sweets.
“We are working on a number of products. Barfi, Kalakand, Peda, and later we will add flavors to it and the shelf life of these products is 40 days,” said RS Sodhi, the managing director of GCMMF.
Dairy major Amul already sells sweets such as Chamcham, Rasmalai, Rabdi, and the demand for these sweets is quite robust, Sodhi added in a recent interaction with Moneycontrol.
Sodhi gave the figures of Mumbai in the sweets market as a reference. The sweet market is worth Rs 1,700 crore in Mumbai alone.
Topline growth
In the first five months of FY20, Amul has witnessed 25 percent growth compared to FY19, according to Sodhi.
Formed in 1948 in Gujarat’s Anand, Amul – popular for its milk, butter, cheese, ghee (clarified butter), and chocolates – is a household name across India and retails through millions of outlets.
Over the years, it has become the backbone of India’s White Revolution, turning the country into one of the world’s largest milk producers.
The GCMMF works with 3.6 million milk farmers with milk procurement at around 23 million litres per day from 18,700 village milk cooperative societies.
On a query whether Amul is planning to hike milk prices, Sodhi said that Amul had already raised milk prices and it did not intend to increase it anymore. However, he did not rule out the possibility of price hikes in value-added products such as cheese and butter.
In May 2019, Amul increased milk prices by Rs 2 per litre in Delhi NCR, Maharashtra, and other states due to an increase in production cost.
At a time when most of the industry has indicated a slowdown, Sodhi said the company had seen a double-digit volume growth across categories.
“There is no slowdown in the dairy industry and we grow at an average of 14 percent,” Sodhi said.
