Today our group visited the Mars India group to see their pet food processing plant. Being a veterinarian I was very excited to the manufacturing of pet food. I was very much impressed by the hospitality and organization of the company. They were fairly open to us while discussing about their product, sales and other areas.
This is the first pet food plant in India set up in Hyderabad and its brand Pedigree accounts for 71% market share in pet food.
The company is manufacturing 13 products; 7 in retail range and 6 in professional range. The retail range is the regular product meant for different life stages of a dog from weaning to adult. The professional range of pedigree is a new launch which focuses on specific problems in dog rearing like joint health, digestive health and immunity. Other then that company imports special products like gravy style, chicken jelly and dentastix. The interesting thing was that they have introduced vegetarian diet specially for Indian pet owners. The diet mainly contains corn, rice and plant proteins.
The food safety and quality assurance is the main focus of the company. The quality testing occurs at three stages of product manufacture; raw material, intermediate sample and final finished product. The raw material mainly used for the formulation are corn, rice, maize gluten, meat bone meal and poultry meal. The products undergo physical, chemical as well as microbiological tests before releasing into the market. The sensory evaluation is done by panel of 160 trained dogs. The company maintains strict HACCP requirements in its plants. Milling is the most important operation carried out in the plant which produces dust particles which can catch fire easily. The factory has established strict safety measures to prevent any harm to the workers as well as plant which was appreciable.
The company is progressing in a strategic manner which is commendable. This can be assessed by the fact that initially they preferred importing the product instead of manufacturing to analyze the market potential in the country. Later the Hyderabad plant was set up in 2002.
I hope as we are focusing on diet and nutrition of pets we should not ignore the millions of people of our country who are suffering from hunger and malnutrition.
Good observations. I believe this visit was really helpful for Value addition group