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.’ Your company has made significant progress on both these pillars in this financial year. Your Company is pioneer in adopting the critical success factors as stated above . Your Company has grown into a formidable dairy company in India and has second largest private milk procurement network in South India. Over the past three decades, the company grown its daily milk procurement volumes at 15% CAGR to 1.6 million liters in 2024. Today, HERITAGE has established a robust network of 300,000 plus dairy farmers across 9 states in India and boasts one of the most extensive regional footprints among publicly dairy companies in India, and its products are available in 12 states. The primary focus of the company lies in the B2C dairy business, where it operates under the brand name ‘Heritage’. Over time, the company has diversified its range of milk and value-added products (VAP), which include curd, ice cream, frozen dessert, paneer, buttermilk, flavoured milk, lassi, milk shakes, and sweets, among others. 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 3 lakh plus litres of additional raw milk daily by the end of quarter 4. For the last 3 decades, the company has strengthened its farmer- partner relations on 3 basic principles. (i) Prompt and timely payment: Your company holds the principle of paying farmers for the milk collected promptly twice or thrice in 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 missed even a single pay day notwithstanding the bank holidays and other challenges. (ii) 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 supplying milk to Heritage, they realize the gains they make because of this, which creates stickiness. (iii) Fair pricing: The company remunerates the farmer for the milk supplied 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 enhancing 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 3,00,000 dairy farmers across 9 major milk producing States namely, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Odisha. The company added several chilling plants through the year, to increase its procurement network and today operates 201 chilling centres/ bulk coolers and procured an average of 1.54 Million litres of milk per day in FY23-24, which is a growth of 23% over previous year. With this, the chilling capacity of the company has grown to 2.4 million litres per day. Your company also operates 18 processing plants with installed milk processing capacity of 2.7 million litres per day. Board's Report STRATEGIC REVIEW STATUTORY REPORT FINANCIAL STATEMENTS 60 32ND ANNUAL REPORT 2023-24 | HERITAGE FOODS LTD
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