Amaya Milk Company faces several challenges in reaching start-up targets

Launched last year with an ambitious plan to push locally-produced dairy products such as milk and paneer, the Amaya Milk Company is facing several challenges as it struggles to reach its start-up target, even after close to one year of operation.
Currently, the company cannot engage a wide cross-section of farmers to supply milk to the plant. This is because of the difficulty of transporting freshly produced milk without first cooling it.

Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Amaya Milk Company, Omkaar Sharma said this is one of the challenges currently facing the company.
He noted that there is a need for collection facilities to be established in different regions. This, he explained, will allow for the company to be able to cool the milk before transporting it to the Onverwagt, West Coast Berbice plant.
“This is one of the things that is going to be key in helping us to have resilience when the next dry season comes because we will be taking milk from a wider area,” Sharma told this publication in an interview.
The current prolonged dry spell has negatively impacted the production of pasteurised milk.
Despite the product taking the market by storm, production remains much lower than projected as the company has had to battle with many challenges.
Among those challenges, the CEO said was that a few months after start-up, a supplier in Canada issued the wrong bottles. It took one month for the correct order to arrive and by the time it did the dry season was impacting the volume of milk being produced by cows.
“There were a lot of grass fires in the area.”
The milk supplied to Amaya comes from cows that use organic food by grasing in open pastures. The grass-fed cows were affected by the unusual prolonged dry spell which led to several grass fires.
“Having those grass fries and the heath also really impacted the animal’s ability to produce because they are not able to get the nutrition that they are accustomed to but then also the slaughtering also meant that we saw a decline in milk production but coming on to December and the start of this year has been better because the weather has been improving because we are seeing our numbers climbing up again,” the CEO explained.
The company initially projected 100 gallons of milk per day and to have that number gradually increased until the plant reached its capacity production level.
However, the plant has never been able to produce 100 gallons of milk in any given day with the highest production just topping 80 gallons.
“At capacity, our plant can actually do 2400 liters per day which is about 600 gallons per day. So 100 gallons per day is still a fraction of what we can produce per day. For about two or three months we were able to produce between seventy-nine to eighty-three gallons for a little over a month but then for a number of reasons like I mentioned earlier, those numbers started dropping. We are seeing those numbers going back up again and we are very excited for what 2024 holds.”
Despite this none of the major supermarkets in Region Five or Region Six have any of the company’s products on their shelves.
Sharma explained that in Region Five, which is the country’s largest cattle-producing region, many persons have access to fresh milk without going to the supermarket.
He pointed out that currently, the company only targets the capital city of Georgetown.
“As I mentioned before, we had the bottling issue and then production numbers dropping…”
Currently, 14 farmers supply all of the milk they produce to Amaya.
According to the entrepreneur, initially, farmers were skeptical about taking their milk to the plant because of experiences dealing with persons who attempted to start similar projects in the past.
“That created a little bit of skepticism with some of the farmers because they already had a market whether it was riding around the village selling and they were a little bit hesitant to give up that and take a chance by supplying us because they would have lost those customers by that point but what happens if we don’t fan out but I think over the last couple of months even when we went through the down period we were consistently operating seven days a week and taking in milk, has definitely inspired confidence and we are seeing more farmers reaching out in the last two to three weeks,” Sharma explained.
He added that the company is keen on working with small farmers as his long-term aim is to have the dairy sector developed.
Despite these setbacks, the businessman remains optimistic and committed to the local market.
According to the CEO, plans are afoot to expand the supply base to include farmers outside of Region Five. He says farmers in Region Four have expressed an interest in supplying milk to the plant.
It was in 2021 that it was first announced that Canada-based Amaya Milk Company signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Guyana Office for Investment (GO-Invest) and the Agriculture Ministry for the establishment of a milk plant to process, bottle, and sell high-quality pasteurised cow’s milk in the local market.
Soon after, a $150 million facility was commissioned. In addition to producing milk, the company is producing paneer, a non-aged, non-melting soft cheese made by curdling milk. (G4)