among the fastest growing milk-producing regions. This gives us great competitive advantage. Government Initiatives and Support: Both the Union Government and the various state Governments in the states where your company operates are taking several progressive initiatives to promote the dairy industry. While Agriculture sector employs the largest number of people in our country, dairying is probably the largest employer within the Agriculture sector. It is estimated that around 80 million people are involved in cattle breeding, cattle rearing, dairying and dairy products manufacturing and selling. The support from the Government is across all these segments of the industry, including support towards cattle breeding, clean milk production, dairy development and feed fodder management. The Department of Animal Husbandry, NDDB, and other government affiliated institutions manage these initiatives in a constructive way. The manner in which Dairy industry would enhance milk production and upgrade milk processing technologies, is also supervised by these departments/ agencies. The company’s operations and evolution in recent years: Your Company was founded with a vision of ‘Delighting every home with fresh and healthy products and empowering the farmer.’ The company has made significant progress on both these pillars in this financial year. On the farm side, your company today collects milk from nearly 300,000 farmers, spread across more than 10,500 villages in 9 states. In this financial year, we have opened 1457 new village level milk procurement centres, which brought in nearly 2 lakh plus litres of additional raw milk daily by the end of quarter 4. We have entered Odisha state for procurement in this financial year. For the last 3 decades, the company has strengthened its farmerpartner relations on 3 basic principles. (1) Prompt and timely payment: The company holds the principle of paying farmers for the milk collected promptly twice or thrice a month (depending on the region). This means faster, but more importantly guaranteed cashflow for our farmers. This year as well, as for the last 30+ years, your company has not even missed a single pay day notwithstanding the bank holidays and other challenges. (2) Transparency and accurate measurement: The company has a very transparent mechanism to ensure that the measurement of solids in the milk collected is absolutely accurate and is openly communicated to the farmers, so that our farm partners know how much they have earned on any given day. Once a farmer starts pouring milk to Heritage, they realize the gains they make because of this, which creates stickiness. (3) Fair pricing: The company compensates the farmer for the milk collected based on measurement of solids (fat and SNF) delivered. The prices are set in a very fair manner and is competitive compared to any other option the farmer has in the village. This helps us attract farmers in every village we enter. While these principles help your company go a long way in empowering its farmers, the company also undertakes several other activities which go a long way in growing farmer income and empowering them financially. Some of these initiatives are • Dissemination of animal care and farm management information through informative videos on VET+ mobile application, which has over 100,000 downloads and monthly active users. • Conducting veterinary camps throughout the year, through 17 veterinary doctors and many vet assistants • Supply of high quality cattle feed and fodder seeds • Training of farmers for better feed and fodder practices • Facilitating loans for the purchase of cattle through commercial banks/ NBFCs • Facilitating Group personal accident coverage for farmers and insurance for the cattle Your company has farmer network about 0.3 million dairy farmers across nine major milk producing States namely, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Odisha. The direct route of milk procurement enables it to maintain quality. The company added several chilling plants through the year, to increase its procurement network and today operates 215 chilling centres/ bulk coolers and procured an average of 1.4 Million litres of milk per day in FY22-23, which is a growth of 17% over previous year. With this, the chilling capacity of the company has grown to 2.2 million litres per day. Your company also operates 18 own processing plants with installed milk processing capacity of 2.65 million litres per day. On the consumer side, your company is already a pan India player and our presence has grown deeper in the West and North Indian markets this year, in addition to our strong presence in South India. This year, the company achieved an average full year sales volume of 1.5 million litres per day, which is a growth of 11.2% in volumes and 21% in revenue over previous year. Value Added products, registered a strong volume growth of 24.5% to cross 400 Metric tons per day average sale through the year and achieved a revenue growth of 33%. Through the year, your company launched 14 new products, across many product clusters and added several new customers. We expanded our presence in the emerging channels like Quick commerce, with the addition of several new customers, alongside deepening our presence in the general trade segments through 150+ new Heritage Happiness Centres, which are franchisee operated stores-cum-neighbourhood distribution centres. During the year under review your Company has purchased the assets and acquiring of procurement & sales network from M/s Heritage Foods Limited | 31st Annual report 2022-23 72
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