Opening the door to health

With its three processing plants, the Operation Flood programme and a wide range of milk products, Aavin has come a long way, since its inception in 1972, says GEETA PADMANABHAN.

IT IS "Suprabhatam" time. Members of nearly five lakh homes in Chennai and its suburbs move bleary-eyed to the front door of their house in a common quest - to pick up the Aavin milk packets.

More than the milk, it is the packet that makes my day. On festival days, be it Pongal, Deepavali or Id, the paal cover flashes a cheerful greeting. It also carries colourful messages on Independence Day and Republic Day. On other days, it tells us to plant trees and harvest rain. It reminds me of the milk cartons in the U.S. which carry photographs of missing children. When a famous actor printed his photograph on a branded carton, everyone thought he was lost. But, Aavin gives you a sense of belonging.

The search for the origin of this feel-good concept takes me to Aavin's Central Dairy at Madhavaram, and to its managing director, K. A. Mathew.

"The Tamil Nadu Co-operative Milk Producers' Federation was born in 1972 and morphed into this dairy," he says "Today, we homogenise, pasteurise, standardise, pack and deliver milk from our plants in Madhavaram, Ambattur and Sholinganallur. Together, the three plants process and distribute 7.5 lakh litres of milk to the city every day. Our product dairy is in Iyanavaram."

"We operate on a three-tier system," he elaborates on what he calls 'the macro background'. "Milk is procured from the villages around Vellore, Villuppuram, Erode, Salem, Krishnagiri and Trichy. About 800 chilled tankers collect the milk from the village-level societies and bring it to the district unions. The unions transport it to the processing plants and collect the money. This job requires super efficiency as milk must pass from udder to the plant in just five hours."

How do you ensure quality?

"Under the three phases of 'Operation Flood' programme, we provide the farmer with loans to buy milch cattle, subsidise enriched feed, deploy veterinary doctors at the districts, teach the farmers hygienic methods of milking and facilitate artificial insemination to ensure healthy progeny. In fact, marginal farmers in 8,000 societies are now free of the debt trap with a regular income from the milk they sell to us. And you will be happy to know that milk societies are run by women."

The statistics roll off his tongue easily. "If you go round the city, you will see 503 depots, 200 vending machines and fibre- reinforced plastic containers of milk in 300 shops selling Aavin milk and the products."

"What is your most popular product?" Surprisingly, it is paal khova, the sweetened well-condensed delight. "And you can place bulk orders for any of our products at the parlours." These include diet yogurt, ghee, milk powder, flavoured milk and tetra milk packs which will last upto120 days without refrigeration! Recent additions to the list are gulab jamun and mysore pak.

"What happens to the surplus milk?"

"It goes to the Feeder Balancing Dairies in Salem, Erode, Madurai and Krishnagiri where it is converted into powder and butter. Have you noticed the letters SNF on the milk sachet? They stand for solid non-fat. Skimmed milk powder forms the SNF in each packet. The fat content and the SNF give the right consistency to milk."

It is now time for a tour of the plant. Mr. Mathew says with evident pride, "Our operations at the Central Dairy have been modernised beyond recognition. Total Quality Management (TQM) has worked wonders. Soon we have also been awarded the ISO certification."

Mr. Veluchamy, Deputy Manager, Quality Control, takes me to the lab. "We follow the PFA Act and the Weight and Measures Act to a T," he beams. "The phosphatase test and the MBR (Methylyne Blue Reduction) indicate the germ count in each sample of milk and help us determine purity. The Milko - scan shows us the composition of the milk instantly so that we can maintain standardisation levels."

The spotless corridors and huge pipelines, the silos and the boilers getting cleaned every three hours, the ambience speaks for itself.

"Where is the milk?" You can't trace a drop of it till it comes out of the packing ma machines. You can't even smell it.

"Since we introduced TQM, worker involvement has been total," says Mr. Ravindranath of Quality Control at the Aavin unit at Sholinganallur. The unit is a shining stainless-steel example of how technology can transform something as old and basic as milk supply. The 150 - odd workers do not carry betel leaves, pan parag, gutka or cigarettes inside the premises. What they do carry is a sense of pride in belonging to a squeaky-clean, highly efficient, computerised milk processing plant set in the middle of manicured lawns and lush foliage.

Signs of TMQ are everywhere. Neatly written do's and don't's and flow charts explaining the processes can be seen in the control room with its consoles of computer, the lab with neatly-arranged test-tubes and milk testing machines on granite topped counters, the area for cleaning the silos and tankers that fetch the milk, the processing plant where the milk is re-constituted and standardised over a 12-hour period (there is a manual mode facility here in case of power failure) and the packing room where men and women in plastic overalls, gloves and blue Aavin caps are busy collecting the sachets in plastic boxes.

A conveyer belt routinely cleans the baskets and stores them for the next despatch. The packets are checked from time to time to make sure of the weight and if you have noticed, they carry the batch number and the date of processing for tracing complaints. Leaky packs are stored in a room maintained at 40C to be tested and processed again.

Sitting at her workstation, Jr. Dairy Officer Padmavathi monitors the entire operation using the Programmable Logic Control System. "The processing is completely automatic and there is no compromise on quality."

I walk around to the effluent plant. Huge tanks clear four lakh litres of water of grease and lye. The water is then air- propelled (a natural method of cleaning) twice and is used to irrigate the garden and the coconut saplings.

"The workers here celebrate happenings in a novel way. Whenever someone gets married or has a child, they pool in cash and buy saplings to add to the garden. All the plants you see are memories of such events."

"Do you get complaints about the milk?"

"Yes," Mr. Ravindranath smiles, "we had a call yesterday that the curd does not set well. We went to the customer's house and told her to change the culture used for making curd. This is more frequent in apartment buildings where neighbours borrow the porai moru from each other. I advised the customer to buy a sachet of Aavin buttermilk to make the curd. We also request the customers to use clean containers to boil the milk."

"What is your USP? Why should anyone choose Aavin over the 30 other milk brands?"

The PRO S. Vasudevan feels, "Aavin is the only milk that comes with vitamin A added to it. Because of the high degree of quality control, we guarantee that even children can drink the milk without boiling." Besides, Aavin assures supply on all days.

Aavin does not monopolise the market. Nearly 7,000 packets of Nilgiris milk flows into the city from its plant at Erode. The supply of milk is through its four supermarkets. Heritage sachets supplied from the plant at Chittur, Aroghya (Arun group) from Kancheepuram and Thirumala Gold popular in North Chennai are all part of the Chennai's milk chapter .

After a trip to the Aavin plant, you can say that you have seen South-East Asia's first state-of-the-art milk processing plant. And raise a cup of milk to those dedicated workers.

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