Mother Dairy to set up milk plant, central distribution facility in Odisha

Bhubaneswar: Mother Dairy Fruit and Vegetable Pvt. Ltd on Friday said it would set up a milk processing plant and a central distribution facility with an investment of about Rs 175 crore in Odisha.

National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) announced that it will expand its programme to empower farmers as part of its plan to inculcate good farming practices through Mother Dairy’s Safal for significantly increasing their income and provide them with access to national markets including Delhi.

Mother Dairy is a subsidiary of NDDB while Safal is the horticulture brand of Mother Dairy.

Safal will double its farmer outreach to 2000 farmers for procuring fruits and vegetables in seven districts to ensure ‘fair value’ for their produce and give them a taste of organised marketing across the country.

NDDB has also approached Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik for giving land in Bhubaneswar for Safal to set up a central distribution facility for collecting and marketing the farm produce in the most scientific and hygienic method to get the best price for farmers.

In tandem, Mother Dairy serves the customers best with three essential planks – digital electronic weighing scale, best prices and quality produce.

Dilip Rath, NDDB Chairman said, “We started small in 2015. Having seen the potential of the farmers and the produce, NDDB with strings of success over six decades is focusing on Odisha as part of “Look East” strategy for Mother Dairy.”

“Our strategy is two-fold. While we scale to get the best of produce from Odisha to sell at our outlets nationwide, farmers are the cornerstone for the success of our plans and NDDB will contribute with all its might to the national goal of doubling farmers’ income by 2022 declared by our Prime Minister Narendra Modi,” he added.

“As part of developing East, Mother Dairy has set up a food processing plant in Jharkhand while it is setting up a milk procurement and processing plant in Bihar. In Odisha also Mother Dairy would soon set up a milk processing plant. Now, the national capital will get to taste the sweet mangoes from Odisha in a big way with enhanced operations by Safal,” said Rath.

Elaborating on the strategy, Dr.Saugata Mitra, Director, Mother Dairy Fruit & Vegetable Pvt. Ltd said, “Our aim is to strengthen our farmer connect to enhance fruit and vegetable procurement from Odisha. Our interventions at the farm level have already started showing results and we now plan to enhance our farmer strength in the larger interest of the farming community.

We are aggressively pursuing to add 1000 more farmers to our network by the end of this fiscal, which will help us to strengthen the procurement from the state.”

Over the last 4 years, Safal has been actively procuring leading varieties of Mangoes such as Langra, Amrapali, Dushehry and Malika from the districts of Mayurbhanj and Dhenkenal through Farmer Organizations.

Today, it has an established mango sourcing base in six districts and is also exploring the districts of Angul and Ganjam for increasing its sourcing base.

“Safal also plans to double the procurement of mangoes from the state of Odisha this season to 150 tonnes,” Dr Mitra said.