How the co-founder of this dairy farm in Jaipur uses WhatsApp to run business seamlessly
Nandita Devraj is the co-founder of Milk & Meadows, a company that supplies farm fresh milk and dairy products in Jaipur.
Every day is a busy one for Nandita Devraj, with most of the time spent on her phone, scrolling through lists and groups on .
As anyone with some knowledge of the dairy business would know, catering farm fresh milk to the doorstep, seven days a week is not an easy task.
As co-founder of Jaipur-based , a company that supplies farm fresh milk and dairy products, Nandita has to cater to a number of queries, take orders, update customers, liaise with vendors and at the same time, keep different departments running smoothly. All these activities, she says, happens seamlessly through WhatsApp.
“I communicate with 80 percent of my customers personally and all my vendors by messaging them on WhatsApp. There’s only so much talking that you can do,” she says with a laugh.
Managing processes on WhatsApp
To keep her clients apprised of Milk & Meadows’ products, Nandita uses a total of nine WhatsApp broadcast lists on two numbers. She is also constantly on different groups – sales activation, delivery, senior management, operations, quality control, and others. . Moreover, she also uses WhatsApp Business, and says the process is seamless.
Milk & Meadows was started in 2019 by Rahul Kapur, who was fed up with the adulterated milk available in the market. So, he decided to buy four cows so that his extended family of 16 could have fresh milk at all times.
“I have been with the venture since the first four cows came home to Rahul's farm. Initially, the idea was to share the leftover milk to friends who had children or aged parents at home. When we began getting a good response, we thought about expanding it to include the local community as well,” she explains.
Soon, Milk & Meadows grew from four to 100 cows and 60 calves, all of them desi gir breed, in a span of one-and-a-half years and supply farm fresh milk and dairy products to over 700 households in Jaipur every morning.
Nandita works with a team of 30 that includes milkers, gardeners, a vet on call, farm managers, quality control experts, delivery people, a contractor and office staff.
Accessible and affordable
The milk is affordably priced at Rs 90 per litre, much lesser than farm fresh milk available in other cities.
“In Jaipur, we knew we could not charge beyond a certain point as people here are very price-conscious. Secondly, our agenda is to create access to fresh milk to discerning customers. So, we make the effort to work on very tight budgets and earn a very minimal profit,” she says.
During the pandemic, the demand went up considerably as people began realising the need to consume healthy and nutritious food. “Initially, we were not prepared for the unprecedented number of orders, and I was refusing people because we didn’t have enough milk. Also, because we are in an essential services business, we got permission to bring in gir cows from Gujarat and kept up with the demand,” she adds.
The farm itself, Nandita says, is very “rural” in nature, and only mechanised to the extent of a cold room and freezers. According to her, Milk & Meadows is run on Vedic philosophies where everything is manual, and cows roam free and eat fodder grown on the farm itself.
“Now that we are seeing it develop into a business, we are hoping to expand our dairy products range that includes fresh ghee pan-India and internationally, if we get our export licences as well,” Nandita says.
This story is part of a series spotlighting extraordinary, inspiring women from different walks of life for the See Us, Hear Us campaign powered by WhatsApp for International Women’s Day. You can read more such stories from the month-long campaign here.
Edited by Anju Narayanan