State to set up chicken processing plant worth Rs 72 crore at Haringhata

‘Plant will be capable of processing 50 metric tonnes of meat in a day’

KOLKATA: The state Animal Resources Development (ARD) department is setting up a state-of-the-art automated chicken meat and its products processing plant at Haringhata in Nadia to cater to the rising demand of chicken in the Haringhata Meat outlets in the state.

“The ball has already been set rolling for setting up the plant which will be capable of processing 50 metric tonnes of chicken meat and its products per day. We will be using technology and instruments from the Netherlands in the processing plant. An MoU in this regard has been inked between the department and a noted food processing company from Netherlands at the Bengal Global Business

Summit(BGBS) held on April 20-21,” a senior official of ARD department said.

The plant will come up on 15 acres land with an investment of around Rs 72 crore.

Presently, the chicken processing plant at Haringhata produces 15 metric tonne per day. West Bengal Livestock Development Corporation(WBLDC) has 630 outlets across the state run by franchises that sell in the brand name of Haringhata Meat.Interestingly, because of the low price of processed chicken of Haringhata Meat – Rs 140 per kg, the demand has been huge and many of the outlets are running out of stock.

Chicken prices for the last six months have remained above Rs 200 for most of the time and presently it has increased to above Rs 250 per kg in the open market.

A senior official of WBLDC said that the infrastructure of meat processing needed augmentation to cater to the demand of Haringhata Meat. So the decision of setting up the plant was taken.

WBLDC expects to make the new processing plant operational by the end of 2023. There will be employment of around 300 in the unit.

“We are setting up the plant with an estimate of the demand for Haringhata Meat in the next five years,” Gouri Shankar Konar, Managing Director of WBLDC said.

Apart from raw chicken and mutton in packets, ready to cook items of chicken, tropical meat like Lean Pork, Fresh Pork, Dressed Pekin Duck, Dressed Turkey meat, Koel egg, and chicken egg are sold by Haringhata Meat. Non-meat items like mustard oil, ghee and honey manufactured by the same brand are also being sold.

The average monthly revenue of Haringhata Meat is Rs 4.7 crore.