Walk into any premium pet store in Delhi, Mumbai, or Bengaluru today and you’ll find a hard, pale-yellow cheese stick selling for a premium price. It’s labelled “Himalayan dog chew,” “yak cheese chew,” or “churpi,” and pet parents are buying it faster than most conventional treats on the shelf.
What Exactly Is a Milk Chew?
The product traces back to churpi, a hard cheese made for centuries across Nepal, Bhutan, and the Himalayan belt, originally as a way to store milk for months without refrigeration. The process is straightforward dairy science: milk is coagulated using an acid like lime or lemon juice, the curd is pressed to remove moisture, and the resulting block is dried and lightly smoked until it turns into a dense, rock-hard cheese. The process starts with fresh milk that is coagulated using a natural agent, typically lime or lemon juice, and the milk is boiled, curdled, pressed to remove moisture, then dried and smoked to create a long-lasting chew.
Once pet brands repackaged this cheese as a dog chew, it took off globally: dogs cannot bite through it quickly, so a few rupees of milk solids turns into hours of chewing, and a premium price tag for sellers.
A Genuinely Fast-Growing Category
Multiple industry estimates converge on the same story: India’s pet food market is expanding at a double-digit CAGR through the early 2030s, and treats and chews are consistently the fastest-growing sub-segment inside it, ahead of even dry kibble. Pet treats are projected to grow at around 10.3% CAGR through 2033, driven by humanisation trends, demand for natural snacks, and D2C expansion. Treats and chews already command premium price points, with growth driven by training, reward-giving, and dental-health claims. Dogs account for over 92% of India’s pet food market and are its fastest-growing segment — and dog owners are precisely the buyers already paying premium prices for “natural” and “human-grade” labelled products.
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Why Retail Shelves Are Still Import-Led
Only one part is genuinely location-locked: yak milk, since yak herds only thrive at high altitude. Authentic yak-milk chhurpi has traditionally come from Nepal, Tibet, and India’s own Himalayan states. Herders there historically had no modern storage technology, so turning surplus milk into a dense, shelf-stable cheese cake was a practical necessity.
The process itself isn’t location-locked. Coagulation, pressing, and controlled drying are steps a paneer or khoa line already performs, and cow or buffalo milk works just as well as yak milk. The altitude effect that once dried the cheese naturally can be reproduced with equipment — controlled coagulation vats, mechanical presses, and calibrated drying chambers replicate the same hardening that used to depend on cold mountain air. Nothing here requires a factory in the mountains; it requires a properly set-up processing line which is a production question, not a geography question.
That distinction matters because India is already a serious producer here, just not for its own shelves. India’s northern states share the Himalayan ecosystem of Nepal and Tibet, and Indian manufacturers already produce bulk yak chews at scale and lower cost, but that output is largely aimed at the US, UK, and Canada. Nepal itself is a major exporter of the traditional product — dog chew exports there reached nearly Rs4 billion in eleven months, close to tea in export value, with the US taking the bulk of it — which is why brand recognition for this category sits with foreign-facing labels, even though production capability already exists on the subcontinent. Meanwhile, Nepal is losing its cost edge: rising milk prices there, running Rs10–12 more per litre than in India, are making Nepali chews Rs200–300 more expensive per unit than Indian alternatives. The gap in Indian retail, then, isn’t that this can only be made abroad — it’s that domestic production is pointed at export markets instead of the fast-growing category at home, leaving room for a price advantage.
Why a Dairy Processor Is the Natural Fit
This is not a new manufacturing skill to acquire — it’s an adjacent product built on the same fundamentals as paneer and khoa: coagulation, whey separation, pressing, and controlled drying. What changes is the recipe (a firmer curd, longer press, a drying and light-smoking stage) and the packaging, not the core equipment category. This product is a chance to use surplus or off-peak milk that would otherwise go into lower-margin fresh dairy.
The Bottom Line
A product made from milk, using processing techniques that most dairy plants already understand, now has the potential to enter one of India’s fastest-growing pet care categories. Today, the market is largely supplied by imports, not because it can’t be manufactured in India, but because very few processors have begun producing it for the domestic market.
Thinking about setting up a dedicated milk-chew production line?
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