October 31, 2013

Amul Dairy commissions Virar Dairy with US$29.3 million project

Amul Dairy has organised cooperative societies in Maharashtra, with the commissioning of its INR180 crore (US$29.3 million) project Virar Dairy with installed capacity of 100,000 litres of milk processing per day.

The dairy has already set up four village level co-operative societies with membership of 500 farmers and expanding. Newly set up dairy plant on 11 acres of land will cater to the consumers of Mumbai city and its suburbs with fresh milk and milk products.

Amul Dairy has 67,600 of farmer members pouring milk in almost 1,200 village societies. In 2012-13, it reported turnover of INR28.5 billion (US$463 million) and expanding its network in Maharashtra and West Bengal.

In a bid to set up modern cold chain, Amul Dairy has installed rapid milk chillers at its newly formed village societies in Maharashtra. The milk chillers have been developed in association with Massachusetts Institute of Technology of USA which can run on batteries and on grid power. The cooperative has also started distribution of high quality feed and veterinary care services through qualified veterinarians to take care of treatment of animals round the clock.

The dairy is claiming that automatic pick and place system of milk pouch filling in crates is not only first in India but also in the world. "The 50,000 litres per hour integrated milk reception, processing and on-line pasteurisation, standardisation and homogenisation facility is first of its kind in India. The traffic management system for operations such as conveying of crates, robotic crate filling of milk pouches from high-speed milk packing machines, each with 160 pouches per minute with on-line check weighers on milk packing lines are controlled through a centralised computer monitoring system," read a media statement from Amul Dairy.

The Virar Dairy can manufacture 20,000 litres of ice cream per day with range of products. It has dedicated facility for fermented products, first of its kind in India, to produce and pack 15,000 litres butter milk and 50,000 litres curd among fermented products.

Virar Dairy has adopted web based real time monitoring system to keep track of production lines from Anand. Amul has introduced rain water harvesting system in order to recharge the ground water to help conservation of water and the sewage treatment plant and reutilisation of the treated water in Virar Dairy is a maiden step in the Indian dairy sector.

The dairy plant has used a mammoth length of 47 kilometres of cable of which 16.7 kilometres cable alone for the robot system for milk packing, 27 kilometres length of pipelines and 1,351 of different types of sanitary valves.