Pelwatte full cream milk powder in the market shortly

Pelwatte full cream milk powder will be introduced to the market shortly by Pelwatte Dairy Industries (Pvt) Ltd owned by founder and chairman of Master Divers and Pelwatte Sugar Industries Ltd Ariyaseela Wickremanayake.

Investing Rs 1.5b he started the factory for dairy produce including milk powder, liquid milk, butter, yoghurt, cheese and ice cream as an initial step to stop the drain of foreign exchange from the country.

At present our country spends $ 300 m annually to import milk while we have 1.5 m cows and of them 150,000 are milching. We pay Rs 30 for a litre of fresh milk while importing milk powder mainly from New Zealand. In New Zealand a litre of milk is sold at Rs 390. He said that if Bangladesh, China and our country stops the import of milk powder, New Zealand will be poorer than us as their main source of foreign exchange is obtained from the export of milk powder.

The milk powder will be in 400 gram packs, is priced at Rs 255 and distributed islandwide shortly. He said that this is also a solution to people who drink imported milk powder saying that they get phelgm when drinking liquid milk. He said that earlier Sri Lankans drank liquid milk from the cows at home while in later years it became a fashion to drink imported milk powder, he said.

Already the Pelwatte brand yoghurt, ice cream and butter is in the market and plans are underway to start distribution around the country shortly.

He said the plant was imported from Denmark and 300 are employed at present. The factory can produce flavoured milk too as pasteurised and sterilised and the capacity is 15,000 litres a day.

It is another first as it is the first private sector initiated milk powder packing factory in the country and has the capacity to produce 10 tons of milk powder, 50,000 yoghurt cups, two tons of butter a day, The plant can produce 4000 bottles of liquid milk in an hour.

“I want my factory to be a model so that more Sri Lankans will start similar factories to make our country self-sufficient in milk and milk based products to halt the drain of foreign exchange from the country”, said Wickremanayake who is also Chairman of Mawbima Foundation which promotes Sri Lankan products.

SG