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Bengal's ice cream market is set to get ‘heated up'. The largest player in the State – Metro Dairy Ltd – is planning to nearly double its capacity to grab a bigger slice of the market pie, in the face of increased competition from national players such as Mother Dairy, Amul, Kwality Walls and others.
Metro, which currently produces 15,200 litres of ice cream a day, plans to scale it up to 25,200 litres a day in the next two years by way of greenfield expansion, said Mr Sumit Deb, managing director, Metro Dairy.
Metro Dairy is a three-way joint venture between West Bengal Milk Federation, Keventer and ICICI Bank.
Fast growth
“The ice cream market in Kolkata in volume terms stands at about 25,000 litres a day at present and it is growing at a fast pace. We are in the volume game and that is clearly our focus. So we want to expand our capacity to tap the future growth,” Mr Deb said.
The company manufactures cups, blocks and sticks of milk-based ice creams. “We will not look at having value added or niche products as our focus is primarily on the mass market,” he added.
The new plant will come up on the Malda Food Park at an estimated investment of Rs 10 crore and will produce about 10,000 litres of ice cream a day.
Ice creams account for about 20 per cent of the company's total turnover, Mr Deb said. Metro markets its ice cream mainly in Kolkata and surrounding districts, through a cold chain distribution network of 40 distributors, with a presence in more than 3,500 retail outlets.
Metro also markets its ice cream in Nadia, Bardhaman, Durgapur, Asansol, Behrampore and Midnapore districts. “We are at present catering to all these markets through our Barasat unit, once this new capacity is operational then it will take care of the Nadia, Murshidabad and Birbhum markets and our Barasat unit can focus on scaling up its production to cater to the Kolkata market,” Mr Deb said.
Market share
Though there was no recent study on the market share of individual manufacturers in the ice cream industry, a retail audit done by A C Nielsen in 2006 indicated that Metro Dairy had about 45 per cent market share, while Kwality Walls was at 20.3 per cent and Rollicks and Amul were at 15.1 per cent and 6 per cent respectively.
“Our share would have now dropped to 40 per cent” he said. According to him, the poor work culture in the state prevented the company to make better utilisation of existing capacity.
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