City-based food and beverage major Keventer Agro that owns the dairy brand Metro is expanding its fresh milk collection centres in West Bengal in a bid to raise its processing capacity from 2.5 lakh liters to 4 lakh liters per day, the company said on Tuesday.
The company launched of its ninth bulk milk collection centre (BMC) in Vidyasagar Industrial Park at Kharagpur and plans to open more in the coming months to ramp up its supply chain, it said.
With this, Keventer Agri that has two dairy brands Metro Dairy and Keventer Milk has reached milk procurement capacity of 170,000 litres per day (LPD).
The total capex in the nine collection centers is about Rs six crore across the state.
The centers now cover five districts – Burdwan, Hooghly, Midnapur, North 24 Parganas, and Nadia and work with 18,000 farmers on a daily basis.
“We have witnessed an increase in household consumption of dairy products and believe that the trend will continue even when normalcy resumes.
“In such a scenario, having a network of collection centres is an important step for creating an eco-system where the company can play a significant part in the states dairy space and be ready to meet the consumer demand,” Keventer Agro chairman and managing director, Mayank Jalan said.
