There is another feather in Amul’s cap. India’s largest dairy brand has become the largest packaged consumer goods company in India, with its turnover exceeding ₹1 lakh crore in 2025-26. For the brand’s promoter, the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation, the success flowed from diversification over time—from milk to products such as butter, ghee, cheese and ice-cream, and then to chocolates, sweets, probiotics, flavoured beverages and frozen products. Above all, it represents the story of India’s largest cooperative succeeding in eliminating exploitation by middlemen and maximising returns for primary producers. Along the way, Amul collected many accolades including the recognition in 2024 as the world’s strongest food brand by British consultancy Brand Finance after scoring high on familiarity, consideration and recommendation metrics.
This unique combination of farmer power and effective marketing began as a small dairy farmers’ union in Kaira district near Anand in 1946. The impetus came from a series of strikes by farmers who had ousted the region’s milk traders. Over decades, it grew to become a three-layered movement—village and district cooperatives, and a state-level federation—engaging 36 lakh farmers. In 1970, the National Dairy Development Board adopted Amul as a pan-India model for state cooperatives. Verghese Kurien’s leadership and establishment of the marketing federation in 1973 made the brand synonymous with the ‘White Revolution’. Yet, raw farmer power may not have succeeded had it not been for clean corporate governance. Popular ad campaigns and jingles like “Utterly butterly delicious” continue to capture the imagination of customers.
There are downsides as well. Amul has become so big that it sometimes poaches into the turf of smaller dairy cooperatives like Nandini in Karnataka and Aavin in Tamil Nadu. Such power has its own cycle—after the early days of democratic teamwork and farmer-leaders, cooperatives often become calcified as traditional power centres led by regional politicians, as has happened to Maharashtra’s sugar cooperatives. Size matters too. To keep cooperatives democratic and serving local interest, an optimum size should be preferred. Even if Amul has crossed that threshold, there is no denying its way of running a cooperative and scaling up must be emulated beyond dairy farming. Exploitation of primary producers by traders is a scourge that plagues the broader farm economy. Advancing the cooperative movement is one of the best ways to get the producer his due.