Dairy supply chain startup secures investments

By Raaghav G R

Posted on December 8, 2017

India is the world’s largest producer of milk but people in India these days complain about the pricey but poor quality milk they get from popular milk companies in India. The milk is either too dilute (mixed with a lot of water) or has been adulterated with a bit of soap to produce foam when heated or some milk companies even sell milk powder mixed with water and call it cow’s milk! There are a lot of problems in the dairy supply chain in India. MilkLane is a Kuppam (AP) – based dairy supply chain startup that solves this problem and supplies fresh high-quality milk, directly from farmers, to milk companies and consumers. The startup announced yesterday (07/12/2017) that it has secured Rs. 27 crores in Series A round of funding from the Switzerland-headquartered VC firm, Pioneering Ventures and the American dairy company, Schreiber Foods. The startup will use the funds to expand its network of milk collection centres and strengthen its data analytics capabilities. Read more on Investments

MilkLane modernizes critical stages of the dairy supply chain and thus ensures that high-quality milk is supplied to both milk companies and consumers. MilkLane was incubated by Pioneering Ventures in 2015 and began commercial operations in January 2017. MilkLane employs a BCO (bulk cooler operators) model. The startup’s milk tanks (each milk tank) can store up to 2000 litres of milk. These tanks store milk strictly at a particular temperature which increases the shelf life and quality of milk.

“We work with farmers on the complete life cycle of the process providing advisory services on managing and rearing cattle, managing farms and providing them with the right kind of cattle feed to help improve the milk yield and quality”, Gaurav Haran, COO of MilkLane said.

“The BCO model, as against a typical central chilling/cold storage model, helps bring down the time taken for collection of milk to less than 45 minutes”, Gaurav added.

The startup presently collects around 85,000 litres of milk through its network of 8,000 farmers across Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. MilkLane has helped the farmers of these states increase their cattle size from 2 to 3 to 25 to 30 cows! It also provides healthcare services to the cows of these farmers. The startup is looking to expand its network of farmers to 1,00,000 farmers from the present network of 8000 farmers by the end of 2019 and it also plans to have 1000 BCOs (milk tanks) by the end of the same year (2019).

“A large part of the capital is being used for daily operations as also increase the number of bulk coolers as we look to expand further. We are targeting creation and collection of 400,000 litres of milk in the next two years”, said Akshaya Kamath, director of Pioneering Ventures.

The other dairy startups to get funded this year (2017) are Wegan Foods which secured an undisclosed amount of seed funding from UAE’s princess, Sheikha Arwa Al Qassimi, during June, this year and Milk Mantra which secured US $10 million (Rs. 67 crores) from Neevs Funds, Eight Road Ventures and Aavishkaar during January, this year (2017). Read more on Startup News

Dairy supply chain startup secures investments