Gujarat, India · Since 1946
Amul (GCMMF)
India's most trusted dairy brand is owned by the farmers who supply it.
3.6M
farmer-owners across 18,000+ village societies
Amul traces back to 1946, when farmers in Gujarat's Kaira district formed a cooperative to sell milk directly, cutting out exploitative middlemen. The model — now called the “Anand Pattern” — spread across the state, and in 1973 the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF) was formed as the apex body, taking over the Amul brand.
The structure has three tiers: Village Dairy Cooperative Societies collect milk daily from local farmers; District Milk Unions process it into dairy products; and GCMMF, owned by those district unions, markets it nationally under the Amul brand. Today that pyramid rests on 18,000-plus village societies and 3.6 million farmer-members — a producer cooperative, distinct from a consumer cooperative like REI: the owners here are the people supplying the product, not the people buying it.
Because the farmers own every tier, the surplus from selling Amul products nationally flows back down to the village level — not out to external shareholders — making GCMMF the world's largest dairy cooperative by farmer membership.
Why it matters
Amul shows collective economics working at agricultural scale in a developing economy: millions of small, individually powerless producers became, together, the market leader in their category.