By Annie Brown | ABC Rural | Australia |
Out of what used to be a bakery in the industrial part of Shepparton, a small processing company is doing things differently in the big dairy town.
In 2016, Kisaan – which means ‘farmer’ in Punjabi – started making Indian-style cheese before moving on to unhomogenised milk.
Owners Jaspreet Singh and Surinder Singh (not related) met in Melbourne after arriving in Australia in 2006 and drove taxis and trucks before starting a dairy processor.
“When I moved to Shepparton I knew it was a hub for dairy farms and there’s a lot of milk around,” Jaspreet said.
“We also knew there was a big Indian community growing in Melbourne and we thought we could start making fresh products with an authentic taste.”
Kisaan’s most popular product is pasteurised unhomogenised milk with the cream still on the top, which Jaspreet and Surinder say tastes like what they grew up with.
“Culturally, dairy is a very significant part of an Indian diet and the authentic taste is missing here in cheese and yoghurt,” Surinder said.
“The milk is popular because it is unhomogenised and elderly people like it as well because they used to get it here in Australia decades ago.”
In the beginning, Kisaan mostly filled commercial orders to Indian sweet producers, but in 2020 they stumbled upon a new market when Melbourne went into lockdown.
“There was one day when I had about 1,000 litres in the van on the way to Melbourne and I was hearing on the news that the state of Victoria was going into lockdown,” Jaspreet said.
“All the customers were shutting their doors and they didn’t want the milk.
“So I rang one of my friends who lives in Craigieburn and said, ‘I’ll give you some milk to make recipes with’. Then his neighbour came out and wanted some too, so we drove around the neighbourhood and gave the milk to people. By the next day we were getting so many calls from people wanting milk.”
Surinder said demand for home deliveries then began to run “out of control”.
“I was always on the phone and my family were upset,” he said. “But I was loving it because we were getting so many orders.”
Now the company delivers about 300 orders a day, six days a week to a mix of home and commercial customers and processes about 15,000 litres of milk every second day.
Read the full story, ‘Shepparton dairy processor taps into Indian community with traditional unhomogenised milk’ (ABC, 7 Feb 2022), here.
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