Punjab State Cooperative Milk Producers' Federation Ltd (Punjab MilkFed) plans to export traditional beverage ‘lassi' to a host of countries including US, UK, Dubai and Australia next year, even as it eyes total sales of Rs 1,750 crore in current fiscal.

“We have plans to introduce our popular product lassi (yogurt—based drink) in overseas markets such as UK, Middle East countries as it has huge potential there because of lot of Punjabi population living in these countries,” Milkfed, MD, JS Kahlon told PTI here.

“We have been receiving a lot of queries from these countries for export of milk products but currently we are focusing on lassi only under our brand Verka,” he said, adding, “We will start export from next year“.

Milkfed has also sought from Centre to declare its Chandigarh—based milk processing facility to give certification for export in order to expand its overseas business. It has tripled capacity of its state of the art Ultra Heat Temperature (UHT) milk processing plant.

Currently, Milkfed is selling ‘lassi' in domestic market only with expected sales volume of over 40 lakh packets a year.

Milkfed at present exports only one product ‘Ghee' (clarified butter) to various nations such as Dubai, Oman, Bahrain, Doha, Kuwait, Muscat, Australia, New Zealand and Bangladesh.

“We also want to expand overseas market of our most popular export item Ghee in other countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong,” an official associated with the Cooperative's international business said.

Milkfed on an average exports 500 tonne of Ghee to other countries with average export value of Rs 15 crore.

“With the launch of new product and expansion of Ghee market, we want our exports to go up to Rs 25 crore,” he said.

Milkfed has a milk processing facility in Ludhiana which is certified for export.

With the rising procurement of milk and expanding domestic market, Milkfed is eyeing total turnover of Rs 1,750 crore by end of current fiscal, up by 18 per cent.

Milkfed is also aggressively adding 1,500 new cooperative societies in this year which will further boost its efforts to source milk from small dairy farmers across Punjab. Presently, it has over 6,000 societies.

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