From cookies to sweetmeat, Amul plans 40-60 new products in two years

Gujarat Co-Operative Milk Marketing Federation, which markets its range of products under the Amul brand, plans 40-60 new products in the next two years. It believes this will enable annual turnover of Rs 50,000 crore by 2021.

In the past four years, it has launched 101 products. The revenue growth target for 2019-20 is 20.7 per cent to Rs 40,000 crore. It was Rs 29,225 crore in 2017-18.

The new products, mostly high margin, will primarily belong to the categories of yogurts, cookies (biscuits), shortbreads (nan khatai), fresh mithai (sweetmeat) and milk-based beverages. 

After coming up with its butter cookies range in the western part of India, the company plans to launch it across the country within the next quarter. Thereafter, variants like cashew, cumin seed (jeera) and others.

In fruit-based milkshakes, the firm will be broadening its Tru brand with new flavours such as double-chocolate, dark chocolate and other fruit flavours. There is a plan to come up with a dark chocolate having 99.99 per cent cocoa content. 

In the sweetmeat space, after trying various products with limited shelf life, primarily in Gujarat, Amul is looking at launching these across the country. 

“We are a dairy company and would like to stay like this. All the coming launches will be in the dairy space (including biscuits made of butter and other dairy condiments) and will be launched over the next two years,” Jayen S Mehta, senior general manager for planning & marketing at GCMMF, said.  The idea is for at least two new products or extensions of existing products every month. Mehta said it would invest Rs 2,500-3,000 crore over the next five years for new plants and to strengthen its back-end milk sourcing. At least seven new plants are expected to come up, in Gujarat, Maharashtra, West Bengal, and Madhya Pradesh. 

“For categories like biscuits and cookies, we can manufacture it in one or two plants and distribute across the country but it is not the same with fresh mithai or yogurt, which have a much shorter shelf life. So, we will be investing in new plants and for that we need to strengthen the back-end as well”, Mehta explainedes.

From the current daily collection of 23 million litres of milk, the plan is to scale up to 25 mn litres. With yearly increase of 8-12 per cent in volume during the near term. 

Even in milk-deficit Bengal, the plan is to scale this up. GCMMF currently sources around 0.5 mn litres of milk a day from this state and plans to raise this to 0.7 million in the next year. 

On whether there is a muted consumption market, Mehta said: “People are talking about slowdown but our revenue grew by 25 per cent in the past few months. The market is there, the appetite is there. It needs to be understood that consumers are smart now; they want value for money.”