HR Foods is creating a milk-revolution in the eastern states of Jharkhand and Bihar with its milk brand "Osam". Founded by first generation entrepreneurs - Abhinav, Abhishek, Harsh and Rakesh, HR Foods is a dairy player operating an integrated model of procurement, processing and selling of milk in Jharkhand and Bihar. Osam is transforming the dairy
sector, directly improving livelihood opportunities for farmers through its safe & transparent processes.
Originally, Osam Dairy hired "dairy promoters" or "milk collection agents" to act as middle men in order to pay and collect milk from their 8000+ farmer network across Bihar and Jharkhand. Osam faced trust and transparency issues at times as monitoring of dairy promoter practices was left to monthly supervisor meetings.
With the help of Lok, Osam onboarded Stellapps, an end-to-end dairy technology solutions company, that has driven transparency throughout the procurement process. In the current system, farmers are able to see the exact fat content and quantity of their milk in real-time upon pouring and this information is stored and transferred to Osam as well on an individual farmer level.
Not only is use of the Stellapps system increasing trust among the farmer community,
Osam has big plans for how it plans to leverage the daily level data in the future.
With direct connect to the farmer today, Osam plans to use the system to gather cattle specific data as well. While this data was once manually collected by local villagers giving Osam access to 400 cattle, Osam plans to use the 5000+ farmers already onboarded on Stellapps today to reach a goal of 50,000 cattle recorded and regularly reported by the end of next year.
This type of farmer and cattle specific data will allow Osam to both better predict and control for seasonal price swings in the market as well as to augment the value-added services they provide farmers including balanced cattle feed, green fodder seeds, quarterly de-worming, and cattle vaccination; which is particularly important in the Indian context given the high economic loss directly tied to the loss of a cattle for an individual farmer. Osam even plans to offer artificial insemination services to ensure healthy calves, thereby increasing the long-term economic value for a farmer.
"In milk procurement, connect with the farmer is the holy grail for a dairy company. Lok helped us formulate our strategy in connecting with the dairy farmer. We have now installed Stellapps automatic milk collection units in about 150 villages which helps us collect details of milk poured from over 5000 farmers on a real time basis. This has paved the way for making direct farmer payments."
"The Osam milk collection system is a transparent system. We now realise that better the quality of milk - higher is the payment. Additionally the company offers services such as balanced feed for the cattle and timely vaccination and deworming services which helps us maintain our cattle and produce better quality milk"
