Kolkata: In less than a month, after West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s visit to Milan, Italy, and two days before Italian Prime Minister’s visit to India, Bengal’s homegrown frozen dessert brand — Milkberry from the stable of Rainbow Dairy Food Product — on Saturday, joined hands with Bizdev, Italy, with the long-term goal of setting up an Indo-Italian joint venture in ice cream, frozen dessert and other food products segment.
In near future, the plan is to roll out some “interesting and innovative” flavours and brands specially curated and crafted by Italian chef from Italy under Milkberry brand name.
Confirming the developments, Jean Claude Morel, founder-managing partner, Bizdev, Italy, said: “Italian companies are very impressed and excited over the positive developments taking place in West Bengal recently. I personally attended Bengal chief minister Ms Banerjee’s business meetings in Miland as part of the Italian business team and our interest in this part of India grew manifold. We are very excited about the establishment of association with Milkberry. We are already in talks with couple of Italian companiies and our job will be to identify the most suitable partner for Milkberry, do hand-holding and take the joint venture to its logical conclusion.”
Siddhartha Sankar Ghosh, managing partner, Rainbow Dairy Food Product, said, “We are confident that it will be the first successful test case of how business houses even from the districts and suburbs are coming forward, inspired by the dreams of Bengal chief minister Ms Banerjee and taking giant leap forward. We are MSME player with a current capacity of 800 litres/hour and presence in the eastern and north eastern states, offering more than 40 variants and flavours. Moves are now afoot to scale up, add more flavours, improve packaging and expand reach with the Italian partner and brands.” The signing of the MoU was preceded by an interactive session on “Steering Successful Indo-Italian Business Partnership in the MSME and Start-up space”.attended by Vincenza Bufalo, acting consul general, Consulate General of Italy, Debasish Sen, IAS, additional chief secretary, West Bengal government & CMD, HIDCO, Pankaj Parekh, chairman, Kolkata, Indo Italian Chamber of Commerce, Ambarish Dasgupta, principal advisor (electronics & IT), West Bengal government, who is also founder-senior partner of Intueri Consulting LLP and a group of startups from Bengal.
Sen said that while business house from this part of the country have started looking towards Chinese and now even Italian technologies, the mission and prime focus of the Bengal government is on ‘making the makers’, that is to create an atmosphere and infrastructure so that world class technologies are made here.
Dasgupta said, “Given the global macro-economic situations, Kolkata or Bengal has its circumstantial attractiveness. There are geo-political and economic factors and advantages, which are drawing the investing community from outside the state and outside the country to this part of the world. After the withdrawal of TPP (trans-pacific partnership) by the US president Donald Trump, then the isolation views, the ASEAN countries needed to regroup and strengthen themselves. The China link road, RCP, OBOR- all became crucial. Given Bengal’s geographical location, strong socio-cultural proximity with many of the ASEAN countries and the fact that it has both road and sea routes, has become extremely important in the new scheme of things. One cannot ignore or overlook Kolkata or Bengal if one has to tap the ASEAN markets…the route would become roundabout otherwise.”
