Pot of dairy gold for Kisaan

“This January, we launched these two products,” co-director Jaspreet Singh said.

“There was a long process to run trials, and there were so many failures, and we had so many community tastings, and finally, we reached on two products — one was natural pot-set yoghurt and the other dahi, which is very well liked in the Indian subcontinent community.”

They entered 15 submissions in the Dairy Industry Association of Australia awards, winning six gold and nine silver positions, as well as the highest scoring natural pot-set yoghurt.

“Usually when they decide they have two, three or four finalists, but in this category, there was only one finalist, and that was us,” Mr Singh said.

“Post announcement of the awards, all three of the judges approached us, and they told us that they couldn’t find anything wrong with the product.

“We couldn’t imagine that in our first year, our product could do so very, very well. We were amazed that we won an award.”

Kisaan started about two years ago, when Mr Singh and co-director Surinder Singh answered a call from the community for different variants of fresh milk.

“We were initially being asked by the people for yoghurt and cheese ... including buffalo milk and we were trying to develop a perfect product for the type of market we serve,” Mr Singh said.

“There was a gap of typical Indian subcontinent-style yoghurt, which we call dahi, so we decided to cater to that market.”

They source their buffalo milk from one of three buffalo dairies in Victoria, sitting in the area between Kerang and Echuca.

When their buffalo milk hit the market, it was selling quicker than they could produce, but now, they produce 4500 litres of milk and curd as well as 100,000 kilograms of yoghurt a week.

They’ve struck gold with their current line of products, but three new products will hit the shelves in the next month, as well as two to release in summer.

“We do buffalo curd, buffalo milk, buffalo ghee and the next one is buffalo butter,” Mr Singh said.

“We do homogenised, non-homogenised, light, skim, organic, all sorts of fresh milks, and we are developing paneer at the moment.”

Their business began as home deliveries to Melbourne and has since expanded to south-east Asian grocery stores, especially Indian and Punjabi stores.

“At the moment, we’re doing about 260 grocery stores in Melbourne,” Mr Singh said.

“We recently expanded up to Griffith. We do home deliveries in Griffith, Shepparton, Geelong.

“There are three physical stores in Shepparton, apart from that, we supply to a few of the cafés in Shepparton, and we do home deliveries every Tuesday.

“We are expanding the distribution of our products to interstate within a month.”