Meat start-ups to be the next attraction for investors in 2016
Meat start-ups to be the next attraction for investors in 2016

In the year2014-2015, Indian start-up ecosystem has brought a storm in the food service market. Start-ups who are present mainly in online raw meat have raise funding and investments. For instance Zappfresh has raised Rs 2 crore ($300,000) in angel round of funding from a couple of unnamed investors. Similarly, Licious has raised a seed investment of about $ 1 million. The investment has been made by Mohandas Pai (Former CFO Infosys), Kanwaljit Singh of Helion Venture Partners along with few other investors.

According to reports, India is the second largest egg and third largest broiler-chicken producer in the world — 65,000 million eggs and 3.8 million tonne of poultry meat a year. The market is estimated to be worth about Rs 90,000 crore. Presently, analyst reported that urban markets account for about 80 per cent of demand, but rural demand to pick up significantly, thanks to lower chicken prices, improving prosperity and changing lifestyles, helping the sector post at least 8-10 per cent expansion.

“India is evolving and all the government initiatives and overall start-up scene in India is booming. When it comes to new age food businesses, consumer is the king and customers are going to be the cynosure of the game. Moreover, our model enhances the customer experience a great deal and that is what serves right to eliminate the pain point of going the filthy portals of traditional meat shops and have a “fresh” new experience” comments Deepanshu Manchanda, ‎Co-Founder & CEO at Zappfresh.

The model

Meat intake in India is at a large scale. So, the starts-ups or the brands have to see what are the opportunities to develop in this business or strategies that they can incorporate in this.

On the same note, Abhay Hanjura, Founder & CEO at Licious shares, “Licious will add tremendous value to the life of a meat lover, there are various aspects that a consumer is bound to love which includes choice of custom cuts, convenience of having all meats in one basket including seafood & cold cuts and the guarantee of germ, insect and contamination free 'fresh' and not frozen meat, powered by the promise of instant delivery with various payment options and easy returns made accessible by new gen-tech solutions.”

At the same time, Licious has partnered with hyper local delivery start-up Grofers in October to scale up its reach across the city and ensure delivery of fresh vacuum-packed meat and fish within 90 minutes of placing an order.

Recently, Zappfresh has tied up with PepperTap, hyper local grocery delivery Services Company to sell non-vegetarian items such as fresh pork, chicken and mutton especially to residents of Gurgaon. This partnership will work on the inventory led mode. Cold storage and stock facilities will be handled by Zappfresh and PepperTap will ensure the last mile delivery of meat products through its logistics network. Manchanda adds, "We are planning to sell seafood with them. We are really excited about the alliance as this will help us extend our product line to PepperTap's user base.”

Seeing to these hyper local grocery deliveries services company, even BigBasket sells items such as meat, beef and pork to their customers. Thus, India's will see double the growth in this sector by 2016 because of high prices and increasing demand of the product.

 
Stay on top – Get the daily news from Indian Retailer in your inbox
Also Worth Reading