In Sanosara village, Mehsana district, Gujarat, a farmer named Rameshbhai Patel poured 400 litres of buffalo milk daily into his local cooperative collection centre last winter. His annual household income from milk alone crossed ₹18 lakh — a figure that would have seemed absurd to his father, who sold milk to a private middleman for … Read more
Beating Coca-Cola and PepsiCo to a global drinks award is the kind of result that cuts through the noise for category buyers and retail teams alike. East Forged’s win as Best Drink Innovation at the World Food Innovation Awards in London is a concrete signal about where no-sugar, low-alcohol beverage innovation is heading — and … Read more
When a small group of farmers in Anand, Gujarat handed their milk cans to a barely-organized cooperative in 1946, they weren’t launching a brand — they were staging a revolt. That act of collective defiance against exploitative middlemen became the seed of what is now India‘s largest food products organization, one whose annual turnover has … Read more
India is home to one of the largest cooperative movements on the planet, with over 8.5 lakh registered cooperative societies touching the lives of roughly 290 million members. Among these, agricultural cooperatives form the backbone of rural economic activity, handling everything from credit distribution and input supply to marketing, processing, and storage of farm produce … Read more
On a damp morning in Singanallur, a suburb that bleeds into Coimbatore’s sprawling industrial belt, I watched Ramasamy Gounder, a 72-year-old retired mill worker, point at a row of concrete buildings stretching along the Noyyal River. “Every one of those structures,” he told a local reporter in 2023, “was built with money that belonged to … Read more
Generic health claims are losing their shelf power faster than most startup founders realise, and Seedlab’s Bootcamp 13 cohort is the clearest signal yet of where early-stage FMCG is actually heading. What strikes me about this latest round is not the individual brands — it is the explicit pivot in selection criteria, from broad wellness … Read more
A three-day programme that promises to turn raw business ideas into investor-ready pitches might sound familiar in the startup world. But when the entity behind it is Dubai‘s own SME authority, and the jury panel reads like a who’s who of the emirate’s commercial infrastructure, the initiative carries a different weight entirely. Dubai SME, the … Read more
Most small farmers in India own less than 2 acres of land and earn under ₹1.5 lakh a year. Yet, in 2026, a growing number of them are crossing the ₹5 lakh annual income mark — not because land prices changed, but because they finally learned how to stack government schemes together. The problem is … Read more
The Mondragon Corporation — a worker-owned industrial empire headquartered in the Basque Country of Spain — generates over €12 billion in annual revenue and employs more than 80,000 people, yet most economics departments spent three decades treating it as a curiosity rather than a model worth replicating. That indifference is ending, and the reasons reveal … Read more
A dairy farmer in Waikato, New Zealand, earns roughly NZD 8.50 per kilogram of milk solids from Fonterra in a good season. A dairy farmer in Sabarkantha, Gujarat, takes home approximately ₹55-65 per litre from her village cooperative linked to Amul. On paper, the Kiwi farmer looks wealthier. But strip away currency conversions, input costs, … Read more
