Parag Milk Foods Pvt Ltd, which sells dairy products under the Govardhan brand, is eyeing joint ventures with local companies to expand its footprint in the north Indian market.

According to Devendra Shah, Chairman of Parag Foods, through the proposed joint ventures, the company plans to manufacture fresh dairy products, such as curd, paneer , yoghurt and flavoured milk among others. However, Shah did not comment on the number or the time frame for such ventures.Parag, which sells cheese under the Go brand and ghee under Govardhan, operates milk processing facilities at Manchar, near Pune and at Palamner in Andhra Pradesh. The company is looking to enhance its cheese-making capacity by about 50 per cent.

“We currently have a 40 tonnes a day cheese production capacity, which will be expanded to 60 tonnes with an investment of Rs 160 crore,” Shah said. He said the company did not have any plans to raise fresh funds and that the current expansion was being funded from the Rs 90 crore raised recently from the International Finance Corporation and from IDFC’s private equity funding of Rs 76 crore that it received last year.

Shah said the cheese market in India is growing annually by 25-30 per cent and that the company had been selling about 1,800 tonnes every month. Besides catering to the retail market, Parag serves institutional customers such as Domino’s Pizza, Pizza Hut, US Pizza, Nirula’s, Jumbo King, Taj Group of Hotels and The Leela Hotels among others.

Parag is also looking at marketing whey, a by-product obtained while manufacturing cheese, as a nutritional supplement in a big way, after converting it into a powder form by using driers, Shah said. Whey is the watery part of milk that separates from the curd in the process of making cheese.

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