For INR 233 Cr, or around $26 million, Chennai-based Hatsun Agro purchased Milk Mantra in order to increase its presence in the dairy industry. The board of the company has “approved the acquisition of 100% of the issued and paid-up share capital of the Milk Mantra Dairy Private Limited,” according to a BSE filing from HAP. According to the filing, Milk Mantra, situated in Bhubaneswar, will become a fully owned subsidiary of HAP upon the acquisition. HAP hopes to increase its presence in Odisha and the eastern dairy sector with this agreement. According to the document, it also wants to investigate its current market in north Andhra Pradesh as well as possible markets in West Bengal and nearby states. Following the acquisition, Milky Moo will be a new brand in addition to HAP’s current ones, Arun, IBACO, Hatsun, and Arokya.
About Milk Mantra
Milk Mantra was established in 2009 by Srikumar and Rashima Misra, and it started operations in 2012. Moo Shake and Milky Moo are the two brands that the firm offers its goods under. It offers flavoured milkshakes, lassi, paneer, curd, bottled milk, and mishti dahi. Due to its ability to keep costs under control, the company generated a profit in the fiscal year 2023–2024 (FY24), generating INR 9.8 Cr as opposed to INR 12.3 Cr in the previous fiscal year.
Indian Dairytech Startups Performance in 2024
In recent years, dairytech innovators have done everything they can to transform the Indian dairy industry, from utilising IoT (Internet of Things) devices to utilising AI and ML. Today’s farmers are therefore more equipped to keep an eye on the health of their cattle, which results in increased milk quality, better dairy products, and larger yields.
Additionally, Indian dairytech entrepreneurs are tackling long-standing problems that plague the industry. Poor disease control, inadequate animal healthcare, and low-quality feed are some of the main issues.
New-age hyperlocal delivery services like MilkBasket, DailyNinja, and Supr Daily (now InsanelyGood), to mention a few, have revolutionised the Indian dairy startup scene by displacing established brands like Mother Dairy and Amul through retail channels. Later, businesses like Country Delight, Milk Mantra, and others arose to solve issues with timely delivery and quality.
Nevertheless, a number of issues still need to be addressed in spite of the boom of businesses in this field. One of the biggest problems is getting milk from different dairy farms. This has a direct effect on milk quality. Indian companies have responded to this by establishing their own farms and implementing a direct-to-consumer (D2C) business model. Barosi, Happy Milk, Doozy Happy Nature, The Milk India Company, and The Good Cow Company are a few of these names.
India is a developing country where agricultural and dairy industries provide a living for the majority of the population. India produces more milk than any other country in the world. As of 2019, annual production was 187 million tonnes. Milk production accounted for over 4.2 percent of India’s gross domestic product in 2020.
Many organisations are coming up with new strategies to take advantage of India’s current dairy position and improve it even further by utilising new technological resources and providing training to the population in order to make them more skilled and technically advanced.
India is the world’s leading producer of dairy products, but it still fails to meet food safety and security criteria for milk. This is due to the lack of expertise and resources available to those who operate in the dairy industry. As a result, many new businesses are springing up with the goal of developing a business plan that will manufacture dairy products that match industry standards and can be sold profitably.
Let’s take a look at some of the leading dairy startups in India that are transforming the dairy industry in India.
The company was started by Chakradhar Ghade and Nitin Kaushal, in 2015. Country Delight delivers fresh, organic milk to the customers’ doorstep. The milk can be ordered through their mobile application and not just milk but different types of dairy products like curd, ghee, etc and different other staple foods can be ordered through the application.
2. Stellapps
Stellapps Website
Ranjith Mukundan, Praveen Nale, Ramkrishna Adukuri, and Venkatesh Seshayee established Stellapps in 2011. Stellapps is a firm that digitises dairy products from farm to consumer. The startup employs the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, and database management, among other technologies, to improve dairy distribution network features such as milk yield, milk purchasing, logistics system, animal insurance, and many other things.
3. Happy Milk
Happy Milk Website
Mehal Kejriwal co-founded Happy Milk in December 2017. The company has its very own farm on the outskirts of Bangalore with roughly 400 cattle. Happy Milk caters to individual clients as well as businesses such as Nature’s Basket and Foodhall. It also accepts large orders. Customers can also make a subscription which is available via apps such as DailyNinja, Doodhwala, and Amazon Prime Now.
4. Klimom
Klimom Website
Klimom is well-known for delivering fresh dairy products directly from the farm to clients’ doors. All of the milk products are created from Gir cow’s milk and are of the highest quality. The farms are located at Sangareddy, Hyderabad. The company claims to have bred Gir cows exclusively, and the fodder is grown on the farm as well. The cows are milked by hand, and the calves are fed completely before the cows are milked.
5. The Milk India Company
The company was founded by Shilpi Sinha in 2018. Milk India company aims to provide clean, fresh and nutritious cow milk to the client’s doorstep. The Milk India Company delivers unprocessed, unpasteurised milk to the customers daily. The company is certified by the National Dairy Research Institute of India. The Milk India Company delivers cow milk in glass bottles to customers’ doorsteps every morning, making it environmentally sustainable.
6. Milk Mantra
Milk Mantra Website
Based in Odisha, the company was founded in 2009 by Srikumar Misra. Milk Mantra began operations in 2012 and has made significant progress in reducing the state’s milk scarcity since then. Apart from milk, the company produces and sells a variety of dairy products such as ghee, curd, and cheese, as well as flavoured milkshakes under the Milky Moo and Mooshake brands.
7. Whyte Farms
Whyte Farms Website
Kanika Yadav and Sanjeev Yadav founded the company in 2015 with the goal of supplying healthy and clean cow’s milk. The Delhi-based startup, Whyte Farms provides pasteurised milk in glass bottles to roughly 3,000 families. The business is based on a 30-acre farm in Tijara, around 90 kilometres from Delhi.
8. Puresh Daily
Puresh Daily Website
Puresh Daily was formed in 2019 by IIM graduate Manish Piyush and his childhood friend Aditya Kumar and is based in Jharkhand. The vision of this company is to provide chemical-free pure milk to the population. The company provides its services through its mobile application, where people can find the subscription plan that suits their needs. Due to milk’s health benefits and being a staple in the Indian diet, the company experienced a 100 percent growth during the COVID-19 lockdown.
9. Matratva Dairy
Matratva Dairy Website
Based in Ajmer, Rajasthan, Matratva Dairy was founded in 2014, the company was founded by Ankita Kumawat, Lokesh Gupta, and Phool Chand Kumawat. The main products of the company are milk and ghee. All the dairy products are prepared by using traditional methods and minimum use of machinery or technology. Matratva Dairy will offer its products through e-commerce platforms like Amazon and BigBasket with rebranding under Goratan Products Pvt. Ltd.
10. Milkbasket
Milkbasket Website
Milkbasket is a grocery delivery service that operates on a daily basis. It was founded by Ashish Goel, Yatish Talavdia, Anant Goel, and Anurag Jain in 2015. The name ‘Milkbasket’ comes from the fact that milk entices buyers to buy other items as well. The company brings milk and other necessities to the customer’s doorstep.
Milk is a vital and necessary component of a healthy diet. It provides the body with all of the critical nutrients it requires. India has the greatest milk production and consumption rates. Many startups have formed to improve the country’s dairy production by introducing innovative technologies and providing training to locals, thereby enhancing the business and creating an environmentally friendly industry without injuring the animals and obtaining the highest potential milk yield.
FAQs
Which is the best dairy company in India?
Parag Milk Foods Ltd, Nandini, Dudhsagar Dairy, and Mother Dairy are some of the leading dairy companies in India.
Is dairy profitable in India?
Yes, the Dairy business is one of the most in-demand and profitable businesses in India.
Which state is the largest producer of milk in India?
Uttar Pradesh is India’s most milk-producing state, accounting for roughly 18% of the country’s total milk production.
Slaughter-free meat eventually manages to jump from the laboratory to the manufacturing process. Imagine biting on a juicy steak without slaughtering animals. Meat from a laboratory of harvested cells makes the idea a reality. Several firms grow beef, pork, poultry, and marinades developed in laboratories.
If broadly accepted, lab-grown meat, often referred to as clean meat, could eradicate much of the cruelty of food-growing animals. The cost of meat processing could also be greatly reduced; energy would only be required to produce and preserve cultivated cells, not an entire organism from birth.
As long as we can look back on history, people eat beef. We’ve all taken it for granted, but science has lately been able to change this. Food can now be grown in a laboratory totally without the body of an animal. This is referred to as cultured meat or lab-grown meat.
Described as clean meat, cultivated meat, cell agriculture, or in-vitro meat by a large array of different terms, the new industry attempts to disrupt traditional approaches to manufacture agricultural products in order to minimize the number of animals slaughtered for food as well as establish a worldwide more humane and ethical culinary framework.
Lab grown meat is eco friendly
How is Lab-Grown meat made?
To launch the production process for cultured meat, scientists will use the stem cells of the animal, the blocks of the muscles, and other organs. Cells are put in amino acids and carbs in Petri dishes for the purpose of multiplying and developing the muscle cells. Where there have been ample muscle fibers, meat-like ground beef has been the result. The meat is first made from an animal’s muscle sample. Technicians are extracting stem cells from the tissue and significantly multiplying it to discriminate between primitive fibers and then building up muscle tissue.
Is Lab-Grown meat as healthy as Conventional meat?
Lab-grown meat is more environmentally conscious than standard meat. It reduces the need for animals that could cut energy consumption by as much as 45% and emit up to 96% fewer greenhouse gases. It is also animal friendly and no animals are unethically damaged or handled.
In laboratory-grown meat, fat and cholesterols can also be regulated, theoretically leading to better health effects as elevated blood cholesterol can lead to cardiovascular disorders, for example. Lab meat can, as certain items are today such as milk, cereals, and bread, also be fortified with the use of vitamins and minerals for optimum nutrition.
Cultured chicken and duck raw materials are not only in the works but also in beef grown in laboratories. In the same method of cell agriculture, scientists often experiment with dairy, egg, and leather production.
Fun Fact
Here is the list of Lab-Grown Meat Startups in the USA:
1. Finless Foods
Finless Food Logo
Finless Foods manufactures real stem cell fish flesh. To this end, a fish-derived serum begins to replicate the cells in a stable environment. Then the fillets and steaks are structured. The final product is also not animal-free, but is almost absolutely cruel and eliminates contamination, overfishing, and degradation of the ocean.
Finless is actually the first startup to make real strides on cultured seafood; other start-ups rely on poultry or beef. The start-up then had to carry out its own protocols from scratch.
Finless Foods needs to supply new customers with experiences, including developing cells in animals that Western consumers have never had before, instead of merely replicating meat and producing a smaller duplicate.
The startup is best known for its organic alternatives to eggs, mayonnaise, cookie dough, and salad dressings, but is also exploring cell-based safe meat. While the company initially announced the production of chicken, its emphasis has since changed to Wagyu beef. Via working in close partnership with an existing Japanese farm, it wants to produce high quality cultivated beef that is sold on the same channels as Wagyu.
3. Memphis Meats
Memphis Meat Logo
Cooked chicken, beef meatballs, and duck cells produced in laboratories were successfully made and tasted by Memphis Meats. The team claims that their goods will be ready to be put on sale by 2021 though a little further from an inexpensive commodity — by 2017, the beef costs $5.280 per kilogram.
In order to build a pilot production plant, Memphis meat will use the funds. CEO Valleti has, nonetheless, warned the industry that a commodity may be launched too quickly, stressing the importance of correcting or risk disturbing the industry’s reputation for several years.
The startup has raised over the US $20 million and counts Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and Kimbal Musk, as founders. Memphis Meats is now a venture capital favorite.
The BlueNalu, which is quickly advancing, produces seafood lab-grown meat to reduce typical fishing and ocean plastics and food. They build yellowfish on cells, which is to prepare and to cook. Other development targets include cod, amber jacket, and red snapper.
The corporation is planning a large range of marine species but initially concentrates on Mahi, red snapper, tuna, and yellowtail finfishes. Their yellowtail commodity recently displayed the same culinary property as traditional, raw or baked, like seeded, grilled, and fried yellowtail.
5. Because Animals
Because Animals Logo
Because Animals have produced the first meat pet food grown in a lab, which involves FBS and unfermented products with a production of serum/growing phase. They are expected to release their lab-grown pet food in 2021. In 2018 Animals released its first offering, a cultured probiotic substitute, at Cultured Pet Food Company. About 250 million probiotics are found inside the all-natural human-grade substitute, one for cats and one for dogs. Over two dozen scientific journals have documented the beneficial properties of this bacterial species and found that the probiotic will lead to better digestion and immunity.
Mission Barns produces fat from laboratory-grown items, including duck, pork, and chicken. In the middle of August, the organization will pick 50 to 100 taste testers to sample the fresh bacon, according to Eitan Fischer, CEO, and co-founder of Mission Barns. The exact number of guests who are permitted to stay at the restaurants while still following rules on social distance.
Bond Pets Food provides cruelty-free, snappy care bars for dogs, packaged with protein. While not anti-meat businesses, they are committed to supplying organic foods that protect the earth and wildlife. they are responsible and food-producing.
Conclusion
Clean meat must be proven healthy to eat to obtain consumer acceptance. There is no justification to assume that lab meat poses a health threat. Meanwhile, conventional meat farmers are repulsed to argue that the products created by the laboratory are not meat at all and should not be branded as such, and analysis indicates that the public only has a particular interest in consuming meat from laboratories. The clean meat firms still go on amid these obstacles. Clean meat could make our everyday eating habits more sustainable and eco-friendly if they can create authentic food goods that are also affordable.
Nitin Konde
