Heritage Foods: From Village Farmers to Tech-Enabled Dairy Powerhouse

Heritage Foods — a leading private dairy company in India — is rapidly reshaping its business around three core principles: farmer empowerment, quality dairy production, and technology-driven scalability.

Under the leadership of Srideep N. Kesavan, CEO (appointed 2021), Heritage Foods is pivoting strongly toward value-added dairy (VAD) and innovation, while continuing to support thousands of rural producers across the country.

Scale & Reach

Heritage now aggregates milk daily from over 300,000 dairy-farmers across nine states, making it among the largest private procurement networks in India. The company operates a widespread chilling-centre and processing-plant infrastructure: as of FY 2024–25, it runs 195 chilling centres / bulk-coolers, handles about 1.7 million litres per day (MLPD) of milk procurement, and has a milk-processing capacity of 2.8 million litres per day.

In recent quarters, the company has demonstrated healthy growth. In Q1 FY26, milk-procurement rose nearly 10% YoY to 1.78 LLPD, even as the overall business braved unseasonal rains and market volatility.

Value-Added Products & Business Strategy

Heritage has been pushing hard into value-added dairy — curd, paneer, butter, flavored milk, ice-cream, frozen desserts — pivoting away from being merely a fluid-milk supplier. The VAD portfolio has reportedly been growing at 22–23% CAGR over recent years, significantly ahead of the industry average.

The company’s stated ambition is to raise the share of value-added products in overall revenues substantially in the next few years — a strategy driven by rising consumer demand for premium, convenient dairy products, and by the need to reduce vulnerability to raw-milk price volatility.

Farmer & Rural Empowerment

Farmer welfare remains at the heart of Heritage’s model. The company supports a large base of small and marginal dairy farmers, ensuring prompt (mostly cashless) payments. It has extended easy-term loans (amounting to nearly ₹200 crore) to village-level entrepreneurs — many of them women — enabling them to expand herds or invest in quality feed, livestock, and farm infrastructure.

Women play a major role: a third of all milk collected by Heritage comes from approximately 60,000 women farmers. Nearly 40% of the village-level procurement centres are run by women entrepreneurs, and a significant portion of earnings goes directly into their bank accounts.

Through these efforts, Heritage has helped create livelihoods for rural communities, incentivized good dairy practices, and opened a pathway for smallholders to benefit from large-scale dairy supply chains.

Digitization & Tech-Led Innovation

One of Heritage’s standout features is its adoption of digital solutions across the production and supply chain. All operations — from milk procurement at village-level to distribution — are managed through a fully integrated ERP (SAP) system, supported by over two dozen tech applications.

A flagship example is the “VetPlus” veterinary-app, which today serves over 1.2 lakh daily active users, extending the reach of just 40 on-staff veterinarians. The app offers advisory, videos, best-practice guidance — massively improving animal health support for remote dairy farmers.

Heritage also invests heavily in consumer research and R&D: it conducts about 40,000 consumer interviews per year, works with institutes such as NDRI, CFTRI and NIFTEM, and will only launch a product if it meets strict quality and differentiation criteria.

Why It Matters — and What It Signals for Indian Dairy

Heritage Foods represents a model for how private dairies in India can combine rural livelihoods, modern supply-chain backbone, consumer-oriented innovation and ethical business practices. Its growth in procurement and VAD segments demonstrates that scaling milk supply AND adding value are not mutually exclusive.

For small and marginal dairy producers, especially women farmers, Heritage’s approach offers stable income, empowerment, and inclusion. For the dairy sector as a whole, it shows the potential of organized, tech-enabled dairying to meet rising demand for quality, branded dairy products — reducing dependence on unorganized, informal milk markets.

Finally, for consumers, Heritage’s portfolio offers safer, varied, and higher-quality dairy products, tapping into changing lifestyles, rising disposable incomes, and increased awareness about nutrition, convenience and wellness.

Source : Dairynews7x7 Nov 30th 2025 : Read the full interview of Srideep Kesavan CEO heritage Foods here