Broke to Breakthrough

Broke to Breakthrough is a business biography of India’s largest dairy products company – Hatsun Agro – and its founder R. G. Chandramogan. Hailing from Virudhunagar district of Tamil Nadu, Chandramogan started this venture in 1970 as a twenty-one-year-old, making ice candies with three people in a 250 sq. ft. rented place and selling in pushcarts. By the mid-1980s, ‘Arun’ ice cream had become the market leader in the state. But Chandramogan didn’t stop at that – he branched into the dairy business by leveraging his brand-building experience with ‘Arun’ and forging connections with farmers. Thus was born Hatsun Agro Product. It is today a Rs 5,500 crore-plus company that also has pioneered a unique model of directly procuring milk from over 4 lakh farmers (B2F) and selling only branded consumer-facing products (B2C).