Bengaluru, NFAPost: Milk Mantra has appointed accomplished food & dairy industry leader Sandipan Ghosh as Chief Operating Officer (COO).
He will lead full company operations and drive scale and innovation at Milk Mantra optimising the entire process of tech enabled growth from farmer sourcing to production, supply chain, sales & marketing and the D2C subscription app.
With his two decades of experience working across multiple food categories and global cultures across India, South Asia, Middle East and North Africa, Sandipan is an expert in consumer dairy with a granular understanding of on ground operations.
He joins Milk Mantra after his tenure of four years as the Commercial & Marketing Director and Board Member at Lactalis Groupe India where he steered the organisation vision in the areas of commercial growth, sales and launching new brands and products for Thirumala, Anik & Prabhat.
Sandipan Ghosh has led brand growth and marketing strategy at marquee food brands in his previous associations with Mother Dairy, MTR Foods, Tiffany Foods, Schmitten Chocolates, Nutrela and TATA Chemicals. His niche lies in driving profits through product innovation and creating consumer-driven operational structures within organisations.
He holds an MBA in International Business from Western Sydney University, and has completed an executive education programme in marketing strategy from the Indian School of Business, and an executive leadership programme from ESCP Business School.
Commenting on his appointment, Milk Mantra Founder, MD & CEO Srikumar Misra, Milk Mantra said he is very happy to welcome Sandipan to Milk Mantra at a time when we are financially geared with profitability & funding to widen the company’s operations and make Milky Moo the leading brand in eastern India.
“His sharp, incisive approach for driving profit through operational excellence, & growth via product-market strengthening, backed by our tech stack, will further accelerate Milk Mantra 3.0. We remain focused on a hybrid model and our alternative subscription app DailyMoo will start mainstreaming in the near future. Sandipan’s deep experience in building consumer franchises will help drive DailyMoo further,” said Srikumar Misra.
Talking about his new role, Milk Mantra COO Sandipan Ghosh said he looks forward to being a part of Milk Mantra at such an exciting phase where it is now a high growth profitable start-up.
“I admire the immense impact the Moo Team and leadership has been able to achieve through its ethical sourcing model and challenger brand Milky Moo. The force of their spirit in serving consumers with the highest quality & service standards, while maintaining profitability even despite the flux brought by the pandemic scenario is remarkable, as is the equity that Milk Mantra has created within the dairy as well as challenger brands ecosystem in such a short space of time,” he said.
Sandipan Ghosh takes over from Bibhu Nanda who, having completed his contractual year with Milk Mantra, has moved on for his next assignment. Sandipan Ghosh has been recognised by the Business Today Group as the Iconic Best Marketer Award 2004, and was presented with the Brand Leader Award in the F.A.M.E. (Fabulous in Marketing Excellence) category in 2011 by Asian Leadership Awards. He has been honoured as the Top 50 CMOs in India by CMO Council in 2014.
Milk Mantra is a new age dairy foods company that solves the problem of trust deficit between consumers and food, and has been widely covered by global media & leading universities for its new-age transformational business. Milk Mantra is India’s 1st VC funded dairy-food start-up and one of the few ventures that went on to raise capital from impact investors to mainstream global investors, establishing that purpose and profit can be balanced.
It was founded in August 2009 by the former director at Tetley, Srikumar Misra along with Rashima Misra and started operations in 2012. As the company’s revenues have scaled up, over the last eight years to become a leading premium dairy brand in Eastern India, in the same eight years, its ethical milk sourcing network has grown from just seven farmers to 68,000+ farmers, many of whose income levels have gone up by up to 70%.
Milk Mantra has raised $25 million VC funding over four rounds from blue-chip investors like Eight Roads (previously Fidelity Growth Partners), Neev Fund (SBI Caps and the UK DFID), Aavishkar VC. In 2020 it raised funding from US DFC.Milk Mantra was also recently featured by FastCompany as one of the most innovative companies in India. Stanford Business School & IIM Ahmedabad have case studies on the company and it has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes & Fortune for its transformative business model.
