Dairy tech company Mr. Milkman was Founded in 2017 by Samarth Setia and Abhishek Goel. The startup empowers dairy farms and milk brands with a cloud-based SaaS platform to predict demand, procurement, track product lifecycle, leakages, last mile delivery and manage unsold inventory, thus, helping them better plan production and reduce losses. “The inception of Mr. Milkman came to my mind when I found the local doodhwalas of my locality managing their business in an unorganised way. There was a lacunae in the operations of dairy in the fields of managing dairy subscriptions of customers, total litres of milk sold in a month, pending payments etc. India is the largest milk producer in the world with 75 million dairy farms big and small with a production value of 150 million tons, but surprisingly 80 per cent of the farms managed their operations using a pen and paper. This is where I realised that dairy business operations if automated can be a lucrative opportunity and help streamlining the business of dairy farmers,” says Samarth Setia, Co-Founder, Mr. Milkman.
Mr.Milkman was launched as a pilot in November 2017 as a platform that allowed dairy brands and milk brands to track key metrics and manage their sales and reverse logistics. Setia informs that the official market ready product was launched in August 2018. “From then till today, we have scaled to 50 milk brands across India. Till date, Mr. Milkman tracks and processes over 1.5 million litres milk per month and by 2025 we are setting up a target throughput of 100 million litres of milk,” he adds.
Reverse logistics
The company also take care of the reverse logistics tracking for its customers. Setia points out that in the dairy industries what comes from the market is just as important as what goes into it. Several components, including crates, glass bottles, and unsold milk, are sent back to dairies or milk brands. Mr. Milkman also helps manage reverse logistics of peripheral items. “It also aids the automation of processes like generation of orders set to go to distributors, retail outlets, or end consumers. The platform can also detect anomalies and notify the sales team of the dairy in case there are any sudden changes in ordering patterns. This helps plug the problem of unnoticed losses,” says Setia.
At grassroot level
Dairy is one of the oldest industry of India and also the one that lacks digitisation and automation significantly. Setia reminds that although the last decade saw quite a lot of automation but the challenge is not just finding any technological solution but one that is easier to implement and can be used by the ones operating at the grassroot level. “Unfortunately the majority of the producers are low income farmers who also lack the literacy level and resources to use technology. The implementation that has been done so far has allowed tracking of adulteration in the milk at the collection level and also digitise the payments to the producers/dairy farmers which helps them with the cashflow,” he states, adding that heavy data capturing and analytics around the production capacity and income of various farmers has allowed banks to provide loans to these dairy farmers which was almost impossible before. Milk brands and organisations now have better insights around the procurement and production, which helps plan the sales and also value added products which lead to better margins not only for the organisations but for the dairy farmers. Portable milking machines, and digital milk coolers are also assisting medium sized dairy producers work efficiently.
Focus on innovation
Currently the company is in the process of adding more features to solve the rampant issues faced by a most dairies and milk brands.
According to Setia, the focus is towards :
1. Operational digitisation
2. Implementation of AI/ML to automate various tasks
3. Identify losses operational level
4. Better predictive analysis on sales
“The idea is to capture as much data as possible to give better business insights,” he remarks.
Speaking about future plans, he further shares, “We are focusing majorly towards operational data and will be adding IoTs to enable us to capture more data from the field operations.”
Setia states that his company has received significantly positive response from the dairies around digitisation and automation. “Organisations have accepted that technology and data is the key to efficient operations and better margins. Dairy already is and will continue to be a major contributor to the Indian economy with more and more players entering this industry to organise the majorly unorganised sector,” he concludes.
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