Just 0.7 percent of raw milk in the UK is processed at farms[i]. The balance goes to industrial dairies. As a result, farmers depend on highly volatile prices on raw milk that often do not even cover their production cost.
Direct Dairy Holding BV (DDH) – a Dutch startup on the edge AgTech and FoodTech – offers a solution to this problem. Dairy farms with milking robots now can produce pasteurized packaged milk directly from the cow with each package traceable to a specific milking session of a specific animal. Rather than selling their raw milk to processing dairies, the farmers will produce premium consumer product and sell it at stable prices with high margins directly to businesses (retailers, HORECA, etc.) and even directly to consumers.
Direct Dairy™ systems integrate with any model of milking robots and work 24/7 in a fully-automatic mode separately pasteurizing, filling, and sorting milk from individual animals. The milk can be sorted in any way: by cow, by milk type (A1 or A2), by customer, etc. One person spends less than one hour a day to service the system: adding extra packages to the filler, changing milk filters, etc.
DDH deploys an innovative Dairy-as-a-Service (DaaS) business model. Rather than selling its hardware to farmers like all hardware manufacturers do, the company sells them licenses to use its proprietary technology and its umbrella milk brand. Hardware goes with the license. The farmers take responsibility for sales and physical distribution of the packaged milk while DDH promotes this milk to local consumers with proceed from royalties received on each package of milk produced.
[i] https://dairy.ahdb.org.uk/market-information/supply-production/uk-milk-flow-diagram/#.W28ZUdIzY2w
