Nishat Dairy all set to give milk processing giants a run for their money

HAFIZABAD: Pakistan’s dairy market is going to witness an intense competition next year as Nishat Dairy (Pvt) Ltd is poised to launch premium quality milk brand in collaboration with SÜTAS, one of Turkey’s largest dairy companies.

This dairy venture has been established by the Nishat Group, a premier business house of Pakistan having presence in all major sectors including Textiles, Cement, Banking, Insurance, Power Generation, Hotel Business, Agriculture, Dairy and Paper Products. Established in 2011, some 104km from provincial capital Lahore in the heart of Punjab province, 165-acres Nishat Dairy has slowly and steadily emerged as one of the main producers of milk.

But the management does not consider it as a distinction. Rather, the company takes pride in associating with production of premium quality milk having least bacteria count, which has been made possible at an end-to-end, fully integrated, near-energy-neutral and most innovative dairy farm. Hustam Jalal, general manager Nishat Dairy Pvt Ltd, while talking to a group of journalists during visits to the farms the other day, said,” With primary focus on quality pasteurised milk products, we are in the process of giving final touches to our product portfolio, which will hopefully be on shelves next year”. “It is a 50-50 investment partnership both by Turkish and Nishat Group.”

Two to three places had been identified to set up the milk processing plants, which could be near Lahore or adjacent to the Nishat dairy farm, Jalal said and added, “We are also in process of acquiring plant machinery and other equipment”. To a question, he said the total investment on launching milk brand would be nearly Rs1.5-2 billion. In sheer contrast to what many other players do, he observed, Nishat dairy truly wanted to sell what they were producing here. He claimed that many products being sold in the market as fresh milk in fact were a diluted form of milk to say the least. “We don’t want to add any preservative, additives, stabiliser or dry milk in fresh pure liquid milk,” Jalal said.

He said that UHT products could also be added to the product profile but no decision had yet been taken in this regard.

Coming to the dairy farm, he said at present there were a total 5,700 cows in the dairy farm out of which 2,700 are producing milk, while by the end of this year this number would cross 3,000-mark. He said currently these cows were producing 80,000 liters of milk per day and all were either of Australian origin or Dutch. “We are presently selling our milk to Nestle and Olpers,” Jalal disclosed. Nishat dairy official further said imported dry milk posed the biggest challenge to growth of Pakistani dairy industry despite the fact that government had increased duty on its import to some extent.

The local dairy farmers were not finding it feasible to sell milk at the cost being offered by main players. In these challenging circumstances, he said this is the right time that Nishat dairy entered the next phase i.e., launching own premier milk products. “Our marketing plan revolves around production of quality of milk. All of our efforts at Nishat dairy farms have been to make sure production of premium quality of milk,” Jalal said. He claimed that the Turkish group was bigger than Nestle Pakistan and its collaboration would help provide Pakistani consumers better milk products. Jalal further said now they had many cows, which were born here and they were performing well in the local climate. He said that the farm used to keep female cows and sell the males. “Now we have also decided to sell these locally born foreign origin animals with more milk yield to the local farmers from next year,” he added.

Regarding fodder requirements of the huge dairy farm, he said, Nishat Dairy met the fodder needs by buying corn from farmers of Chiniot and surrounding area. “We pay these farmers in a systematic way and that is why they are eager to sell their produce to our farms. We have our own modern farm of fodders under the supervision of Louis Lategan, the farm manager,” Jalal said. He said their main requirements of Alfalfa, a protein rich fodder were met from our own farms.

The innovative precision agriculture techniques like micro irrigation help us produce high yielding fodder including Rhode grass with minimal use of water, he said.

Talking about meeting energy needs of the dairy farm, Jalal said, “We have set up one of the pioneering solar PV plants under net metering arrangement. “In winter months, being self-sufficient in power generation, we used to sell surplus electricity to power distribution company. The peak generation from clean energy from solar plants hovers around 0.8mw,” Jalal said.

To a question about manure management, he said, “We use farm manure as a bio fertiliser. We are also planning to process it into granular form with the help of Chinese technology. Every resource and by products of the farm are being efficiently used to increase productivity,” he observed.