LMF's Ambewela brand surges ahead

Lanka Milk Foods (CWE) Plc, which markets a number of market leading brands including Ambewela, Daily, Lakspray and My Juicee has been recording an impressive growth in the current year.

The main focus of the organisation has been to expand its Ambewela Range of dairy products with as many as 4 new products being launched within the last year, which has given the brand a sales growth of over 50% over the previous year.

The Ambewela Brand which has been the undisputed market leader in the UHT Fresh Milk category for a number of years decided to strategically expand its range of products in order to poise itself to become the leader in the overall dairy business in Sri Lanka. With this vision, Ambewela entered the Non Fat Milk, Yoghurt, Flavoured Milk and Cheese categories, with an impressive entry in each segment and managed to capture significant market shares in each of the categories. Patrick Wickramasinghe, General Manager – Sales of LMF stated, “The Brand has already within an extremely short period of one year managed to become a leading player in each of the segments in their areas of operation, and we expect to expand our range further in the near future, and have already planned out significant distribution strategies to enter in to the new segments”. He went on further to add that LMF is also currently in the process of expanding capacity on products such as Yoghurt where there is tremendous demand.

Tilan Wijeyesekera, General Manager – Marketing of LMF stated, “We envisioned a tremendous future potential in the Sri Lankan Dairy industry and invested over a billion rupees on our ultra modern state of the art factory in Ambewela in 2009, which has already started to produce some extraordinary results for the company, and we have also made significant investments on building brand equity for the Ambewela brand, which is fast becoming one of the most valuable FMCG brands in the country”.

The uniqueness of Ambewela products, is that they source milk exclusively from their own two farms, New Zealand Farm (Pattipola Farm) and Ambewela Farm which are both located in the Ambewela region. These farms are two of the largest in Sri Lanka located 6000 Feet above sea level, and are renowned for having the best grazing grounds in Sri Lanka. Today these two farms have a herd of over 1750 pure bread Friesian and Ayrshire cattle, imported from some of the finest stocks around the world. They also conform to the highest international dairy standards with milk produced without any human touch with ultra modern fully automated milking parlours and high capacity feed mills. This is in stark contrast to any other mainstream dairy organisation in the country which practices milk collection from multiple sources, where quality control could become a significant problem. As an example the milk from Ambewela has a micro bacterial count as low as 50,000 which is well within international standards whilst the collected field milk in the country has a 2,000,000 micro bacterial count. This in itself displays the far superior milk quality of Ambewela.

The extent to which they go towards maintaining excellence in Dairy production is exemplified by the milking parlours including a sound system which plays Beethoven music for the milking cows which has been proven through research to increase the quality of the milking process. The cows are also pampered in order for them to remain comfortable which also contributes to the quality of milk produced, with one such example being the inclusion of massaging rotating brushes on the farm, where cows can simply go and rub against it for an automatic motor to start massaging them. Thus the management of the company maintains that they are undoubtedly the most advanced integrated dairy manufacturing and marketing company in the country with the finest quality dairy products. The company’s Research & Development teams are constantly working towards introducing further new products to cater to unmet consumer needs.