Interview with Jochen Ebert, Business Development Danone Dairy India
Jochen Ebert, General Manager of Danone India / South Asia, is recently become head of Grameen Danone Foods Ltd.
I decided to know more on his functions, his plans for GDFL…
Could you talk about your previous experiences and current situation in Danone Group?
I was already linked with Groupe Danone in the early 90’s as student and “stagiaire”. In 1996 I started as BM for Actimel in Danone Germany and continued till 2001 when I was responsible for the marketing groups “Health” (Actimel and Activia) and “Dessert” (Dany Sahne). After that I was responsible as Marketing Director for the Danone – Al Safi JV in Saudi Arabia. After 2 years outside of Danone I am now responsible for Danone India and South Asia since June 2006.
What about Danone in South Asia? What are the prospects in this emerging region?
South Asia today is “virgin land” for Danone. Currently the only operative business is our social business project with Grameen in Bangladesh. Next to that we are convinced that India and Pakistan are representing major opportunities for the Dairy pole – not only due to the huge number of consumers, but also due to the deeply rooted dairy tradition existing in theses countries. We are in an advanced stage of planning for both countries and hope to start selling in 2009
Who was at the origin of the rapprochement between your team and Grameen Danone Foods Ltd?
After the initial phase of the project where the focus was laid on building an affordable “low Capex” factory in Bogra under the lead of Guy Gavelle, it was clear that after the launch further expertise was needed in all functions of the business. Bernard Hours, Emmanuel Faber and Felix Martin consequently decided to integrate Bangladesh in the regional Dairy structure. This process was initiated in the 2. quarter of 2008 and we are very positive about the cooperation between the Bangladesh, the regional and the global teams .
How is the transition with Emmanuel Marchant going on?
Excellent. We are all aware that we are still a very small company with a lot of improvement potential in all functions. But we see progress on all fronts and we are happy to have Emmanuel with us who knows the history of the company … and anyhow he will remain very involved in his role within danone communities.
Concretely, how the collaboration is going on between Danone and GDFL people? What does Danone South Asia bring to GDFL and what could your people learn from GDFL?
A big part of the expertise needed we have to develop together as a team, namely how to create a sustainable social business with very affordable products. Obviously Danone impact focuses on our areas of strengtgh as R&D, Quality, Supply chain and finance. GDFL not only takes the lead in establishing the Grameen ladies sales force and making them a key element in the brand communication, they also manage all major corporate governance issues. Obviously the support of Prof. Yunus and his team is of huge importantance to understand the specificities of the country.
What are your plans for the further development of GDFL?
We first want to find a sustainable business model for the Bogra area – major challenge is to further fine tune product positioning and price points. This would then enable us to further roll-out in neighbouring regions and would eventually lead to the establishment of further factories in Bangladesh.
When was your first trip in Bangladesh and what were your feelings about the country and GDFL?
I first went to Bangladesh in May 2007. Bangladesh makes you aware that major global problems can be very concrete for the common man, be it the visible malnutrition of kids in the country, be it the threat via a dramatic increase of cost for food and fuel or be it via the very imminent threat caused by global warming and the rising of water levels. On the other side I am deeply impressed by the friendliness of the people and the natural beauty of this country and I think we can all be very proud that GDFL will contribute very positively to the further development of the country.

Kids eating shocktidoi, find other pictures on danone.communities by Flickr
Finally what does the social business represent according to you? How would it possible to raise the social impact of the project?
We at Danone just started to experiment with social business models. The key factor to make it a success is “significance”. A major social impact can only be achieved when we are talking about a volume business that reaches the majority of people in need.














