Dairy firm Milk Mantra is planning to acquire a plant in Kolkata and set up a new plant for curd at its existing facility in Odisha at an estimated investment of around Rs 70 crore as part of its strategy to expand business, a top company official has said.
In an interview with PTI, its founder Srikumar Misra said the company is in discussion with a few players to acquire a dairy plant in Kolkata.
At present, the company has two dairy plants at Puri and Sambalpur in Odisha with a processing capacity of 300,000 litres per day.
It sells around 100,000 litres of pouched milk per day in the state under Milky Moo brand. The dairy products like curd and paneer are also sold in neighbouringa West Bengal, Jharkhand and Chhattisgrh states.
“We are looking to expand presence in new markets in eastern states. We are in talks with few dairy owners to acquire an existing plant with up to 100,000 litre processing capacity,” Misra told PTI.
The total investment in acquiring the plant and then modernising with state of the art equipments is estimated at around Rs 40 crore, he said.
That apart, Misra said,Milk Mantra willset up a curd manufacturing plant at its existing factory in Odisha at an investment of Rs 30 crore.
On funding, he said the company has raised around Rs 250 crore so far as equity and debt, which includes $10 million or Rs 75 crore from the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) as structured debt.
Asked about the turnover, Misra said the company’s revenue grew to Rs 226 crore last fiscal from Rs 200 crore in the previous year. About 70 per cent of revenue came from fresh cow milk, which it sells at a premium rate of Rs 50 per litre.
“Our focus is on first making the company profitable instead of growing revenue,” he said.
Milk Mantra has also introduced milk shakes and dairy desserts in the market.
On the outlook for this fiscal, Misra said the business has been impacted due to Covid-19 but the same would get compensated in the second half of this fiscal year.
“Overall, we see similar revenue number or marginal growth in this financial year,” he said.
Misra noted that the company did not reduce the price it pays to farmers for milk procurement.
“We are a new-age Indian dairy startup and our vision since inception was to solve the problem of trust deficit between consumers and food in India’s large $50 billion dairy industry,” Misra said.
Milk Mantra was founded in August 2009 by the former director of Tetley Srikumar Misra along with Rashima Misra and started operations in 2012. Its milk sourcing network has grown to over 60,000 farmers.
Milk Mantra has raised venture capital funding from investors like Eight Roads (previously Fidelity Growth Partners), Neev Fund, and Aavishkar VC.
