Mr Milkman, a last-mile dairy supply chain SaaS platform, is already being used by over 60 Indian dairy brands and other industries to manage customer subscriptions and deliveries with unrivaled efficiency. From the farm all the way to the end consumer, the real-time analytics platform easily tracks all sales data, provides a complete performance overview, and enables informed business decisions. Below is a snippet from a recent interaction between team IT-Voice and Samarth Setia, CEO & Co-Founder, Mr Milkman.
Prateek: Tell us about the vision behind the Milkman, please.
Samarth Setia: India is the world’s largest milk producer and consumer and yet is the most unorganized sector. More than 70% of the market is unorganized where business is still happening in traditional ways. We saw this gap as an opportunity to explore and work on. At Mr. Milkman, we offer cloud-based dairy distribution management solutions to milk producers in order to allow them to operate much more efficiently and help them reduce losses. We offer cloud-based solutions that allow our users to track sales, product delivery, and monitor their performance along with managing product distribution, customer subscriptions, customer orders, logistics, and inventory. We are trying to streamline the working methodology in the industry. And we found this synergy with Dairy.com. We are working on providing comprehensive solutions that enable the dairy supply chain to feed a growing world. Together, Dairy.com and Mr.Milkman will innovate and accelerate the development of last-mile delivery technology in the dairy business across India, North America and Europe as part of its suite of end-to-end supply chain solutions
Prateek: How technology is ought to change the traditional dairy industry?
Samarth Setia: In over a decade, the dairy industry has seen tremendous changes through technology-driven products, services and solutions. In dairy farming, technology has been a game-changer worldwide. From milking machines to health tracking devices for cattle, feed management systems to transportation and last-mile delivery, technology has helped streamline the value chain. The market is also expanding and witnessing product innovation which is adding additional revenue generating opportunities. With Value Added Products (VAP) like yogurt, cheese, flavored yogurt and others, there is a vast market offering immense growth potential. In order to leverage these opportunities, it is again imperative to have an efficient and effective tech-enabled system to track such conversion of milk to Value Added Products and ensure the maximum utilization and profitability.
Prateek: How has the experience been so far? What are some of the challenges?
Samarth Setia: Even though the Indian dairy industry is the largest in the world, the lack of automation and digitization has been a roadblock for growth of the industry. And this is exactly what we have been trying to solve. The platform was designed to optimize operations and digitize all that was still managed on paper. We started with one dairy and today work with more than 60+ medium to large dairies from across India who are using our solutions.
Having a customer-first approach, today we, along with Dairy.om offer services starting from procuring milk to packaging and delivery, automating and streamlining every step all the way to the last mile. Yet, the apprehension towards adopting technology has been a roadblock. We are a one-stop solution, trying to make this sector a much more efficient and, eventually, a higher margin play for the Indian dairy players. The dairy sector has been run in a very traditional manner for many years and the new generation of dairy entrepreneurs are changing that.
Prateek: How can the consumers benefit from the solutions provided by Milkman?
Samarth Setia: In order to organize a largely unorganized sector, Mr. Milkman, a SaaS platform, provides automation tools to automate order processing, route allocation and distribution management along with real-time analytics and reports.
In the dairy business, what comes back from the market is just as important as what goes into it. What I mean by that is, there are several components, such as crates, returned milk, glass bottles, etc., which are sent back to the dairies or milk brands. Mr. Milkman also helps manage the reverse logistics in these cases. Thus, from forecasting production to tracking damages and managing reverse logistics, Mr. Milkman takes care of it all. Apart from this, it also aids the automation processes like the generation of orders which are set to go to distributors, retail outlets or end consumers. The platform can also detect anomalies and notify the sales team in case there are any sudden issues in the ordering patterns. This helps plug in the problem of unnoticed losses for our clients. Additionally, dairy farm analytics, market intelligence, transportation management, data intelligence, risk management, plant operations optimization are just a few of the many solutions offered by Dairy.com and we are bringing all of these to the Indian dairy industry through our association with them.
Prateek: Where do you want to take the organization in the coming years?
Samarth Setia: Our priority is expansion and education. We want to reach out to dairies overseas and explore the options available there as well. With Dairy.com we are well-positioned to thrive in India as our solutions are ideally suited to successfully support the country’s exponential rise of e-commerce and its increasing consumer demand for convenience, value, food safety, ease of payment, and product variety from the industry. We are capable of offering the best of solutions from both worlds. And, of course, explore the other international markets. Over the next few months, we plan to triple our team size, provide improved service and are looking at launching some new products which are in the pipeline for India, and also “Indianize” some of Dairy.com’s solutions in order to launch in India.
