A lot happens before you take a bite of your Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate bar and relish its silky smoothness. Behind the scenes, a half a kilometre long production line transforms raw ingredients into a culinary masterpiece. The journey begins with the precise mixing of chocolate crumb with milk powder, sugar, and a closely guarded ‘secret sauce’, setting the stage for a symphony of precision and passion.

As the mixture traverses the automated production line, it’s heated to perfection, molded into iconic bars, and then cooled to awaken the flavors. Advanced sensors scrutinise every bar for unwanted materials, while trained ‘tasters’ vouch for the standardised taste. Finally, the bars are carefully packaged, ready to delight consumers.

A peek into the production lines of chocolate maker Mondelez at Sri City in Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh displays this seamless dance of technology and craftsmanship with minimal human intervention, governed by fully digitised systems and automated processes.

Expansion

Mondelēz International, Inc., a snacks and chocolate maker, has said that the second phase of its manufacturing unit at Sri City in Chittoor district will be completed in the next 2-3 years. Being taken up with an investment of ₹1,600 crore, the second phase would double our production to two lakh tonnes a year.

Of the current capacity of 1 lakh tonnes, about 60 per cent is finished goods and 30,000 tonnes is the ingredients that we use for producing the products.

Venkat Venepally- Vice-President, Supply Chain- Mondelez India, said that the rollout would be fined-tuned factoring in the production requirements. “It is demand-driven. We are modular. We will scale this up depending on the demand,” he said.

The Nasdaq-listed company registered revenues of $36 billion globally in 2023, with 49 per cent of revenues coming from biscuits and baked snacks and 30 per cent coming from chocolates.

The second phase at Sri City is expected to create 660 new jobs, which would double the workforce on the 136-acre site. The investment of ₹1,600 crore is part of the company’s total investments of ₹4,000 crore that it announced recently for developing its production capacities in India. The investments would be deployed through 2023 to 26.

“About 80 per cent of the employees in the second phase would be local and the total gender mix would be 50:50,” Venkat said.

The Sri City facility is the biggest manufacturing facility for the company in the Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa (AMEA) region.

“Post expansion, the facility in Andhra Pradesh would be among the biggest manufacturing facilities of the company across the world,” he said.

We didn’t want it to be just one more manufacturing facility. We wanted to build an end-to-end integrated supply chain. All the suppliers (packaging) are a few minutes away from the facility. “When bought land here, we also bought land for our suppliers,” he said.

“The USP is the team. No hierarchy. The production lines works with zero white-collar employees manning the site for 16 hours a day, and 36 hours on the weekend.

“That is the sort of authority that the people have on the shop floor. Most of our shop floor colleagues run the most advanced technologies in chocolate making at the world’s biggest scale are high-school passouts. We hire them and train them, we invest a lot to train them for up to four months. They spend 6-8 years before becoming white-collared employees,” he added.

(The reporter is in Sri City on Mondelez’s invitation)

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