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OTHERS Freeze that. From 50-60 tonnes of paneer a day, Milky Mist is scaling up to produce a whopping 100 tonnesChanging tastes. How, in three decades, the Erode-based company made cottage cheese a household product in the South
Glistening white blocks of fresh paneer (cottage cheese) come hurtling down a conveyor belt, met by robotic arms that slice the blocks precisely into half kg chunks. Another arm quickly pushes out the paneer slabs that are not the correct size and weight into a drum before the next right-sized chunk comes along — all at bewildering speeds — and is packaged in a Milky Mist branded tub. The tubs are then stacked in boxes ready to be sent out in refrigerated trucks to retail shelves. Elsewhere in the cavernous dairy floor, paneer is being sliced into small cubes to be packaged and sold as frozen paneer.
This sprawling, highly automated dairy of milk processing major Milky Mist is set amidst vast green fields in a verdant belt of Erode district in Tamil Nadu. Apart from humungous quantities of paneer, the dairy churns out a variety of over 20 products and over 350 SKUs, mostly under the Milky Mist brand. In different sections of the dairy, one can see ghee, cheese, fresh cream in cartons, buttermilk, milk shakes, Greek yoghurt, protein enriched curd under its Skyr brand, ice cream, chocolates under the Capella brand and more are being produced. “We process close to one million litres of milk per day sourced from around 70,000 farmers spread over 12 districts,” says T Satish Kumar, the self-effacing founder and managing director of Milky Mist and the ‘pioneer of paneer’ in the South. From producing 50-60 tonnes of paneer a day, the plant is scaling up to produce a whopping 100 tonnes of paneer...