Britannia Industries Limited (BIL) has lined up a slew of milk-based products, as part of its plans to rev up its presence in the dairy segment.
The company will launch milk shakes in tetra packs across the country this month, dairy business head, Venkat Shankar, said.
“Our intent has been to build a portfolio skewed towards the value-added segment. To this end, we have built a product range with cheese, dairy-whiteners, yoghurts and dairy-drinks as the mainstay.. we believe that we have built a platform at the front-end and are poised to expand along the value-chain and build a strong back-end leading to a robust, end-to-end dairy business,” he said.
Even as BIL’s backend gets ready at Maharashtra, the company is creating new paradigms in the dairy sector at its 100-year milestone.
The upcoming Ranjangaon unit is its largest and most comprehensive to date.
BIL’s milk procurement facility piloted with 8 milk collection centres spread across 11 villages and covering 650 farmers. It will be scaled to over 30 centres by this fiscal.
Dairy investment has been pegged at ₹500 crore over three years.
At an earlier investor call, managing director Varun Berry had said that the investment in dairy back-end was part of the firm’s plans to have fully integrated dairy operations.
Britannia will also launch value-added products across cheese, milk-drinks and dairy-whitener categories by March 2019.
BIL’s has been in the dairy business for nearly two decades. Its contribution from the segment was about ₹400 crore in 2017-18. “We have firm plans to scale business to ₹1,500 crore by 2022-23.” Mr. Shankar said.
Admitting that the absence of a back-end facilities had led to Britannia’s products being priced at a premium, Mr. Shankar said that increasingly, through a combination of various internal efficiencies, it had begun a concerted move towards a more competitively-priced regime. “We will need to be priced competitively to drive our volumes.” he said.
