ET Soonicorns Summit 2025: Licious founders on building India's first scaled meat brand
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The ET Soonicorns Summit 2025 returns to Bengaluru on 22 August, featuring a fireside chat with the founders who have significantly shaped a category long considered difficult to organise. In a session titled 'The Mindset of Market Makers: Lessons from Building India's First Scaled Meat Brand,' disruptors Abhay Hanjura and Vivek Gupta will reveal how they built Licious, India's first direct-to-consumer (D2C) unicorn, by tackling one of the country's most fragmented and challenging markets.For generations, buying meat in India was associated with compromised hygiene, inconsistent quality, and a fundamental lack of trust. The experience was confined to local wet markets and neighbourhood butcher shops, where freshness was often subjective and formal quality assurance standards were limited. The concept of meat and seafood as a premium, branded product seemed alien to a market driven by proximity and price.Licious, founded in 2015 by Abhay Hanjura and Vivek Gupta, dived into this complex dynamics. The company proposition challenged convention: offering Indian consumers a trustworthy, hygienic, and convenient way to buy high-quality meat and seafood, delivered to their doorstep.India's meat market is a colossal opportunity, valued at over USD 55 billion, but with over 90% of it remaining in the unorganised sector. According to a 2023 Economic Times report , independent ecommerce analyst and Datum Intelligence advisor Satish Meena estimated the size of India's online meat and seafood market at around ₹2,500–3,000 crore. This represented less than 1% of the country's total meat and seafood sector, which continues to be largely unorganised.This fragmentation created a notable gap in quality, safety, and consumer experience—one that Licious set out to address. The company's journey from a disruptive idea to a market leader offers a playbook on how to build a brand by solving deep-seated consumer problems through operational and technological excellence.From commodity to brand: How do you build trust and brand loyalty for a product that has always been treated as an unbranded commodity?The cold chain moat: Was the decision to build a complex, temperature-controlled supply chain from the ground up the key to their defensibility?The science of freshness: How does technology, from predictive analytics for demand to over 150 quality checks, transform the business of fresh protein?Expanding the kitchen share: How did Licious move beyond fresh cuts to ready-to-cook and ready-to-eat categories to increase customer loyalty and order value?The omnichannel play: In a D2C-first world, what is the strategy behind expanding into physical retail stores, and how does it complement the digital experience?Abhay Hanjura and Vivek Gupta have built a company that has influenced consumer behaviour in India's meat and seafood segment. Licious's success is a testament to solving a core problem, not with superficial features, but by re-engineering the entire value chain.At the heart of Licious's defensibility is its farm-to-fork model, which includes a meticulously managed cold chain that ensures products are maintained between 0-4°C from sourcing to processing and last-mile delivery. This prioritising of quality and freshness has built immense trust with consumers, reflected in repeat purchase rates. Their journey with Licious offers crucial lessons on building a moat through operational rigor, deep-seated in technology and an unwavering focus on the consumer.The founders' vision extended beyond delivering fresh meat, aiming to elevate what was once a purely transactional purchase into a more premium experience. By introducing vacuum-sealed packaging, precise cuts, and removing the odour and inconvenience associated with traditional butcher shops, Licious made buying meat a clean, modern, and reliable activity. The expansion into ready-to-cook meals, marinades, and even plant-based alternatives under the brand 'Uncrave' showcases their ability to evolve with consumer needs and capture a larger share of the Indian kitchen.As Indian startups navigate an increasingly competitive landscape, the ability to identify a broken consumer experience and rebuild it from the ground up will be the ultimate differentiator. Licious's journey suggests that market leadership requires more than disruption—it demands the sustained effort of building a trustworthy and dependable brand.When Hanjura and Gupta take the ET Soonicorns Summit 2025 stage, they will discuss how a sustained focus on the consumer and operational excellence can help develop and expand a market category. The company's significant reduction in losses in FY24, alongside its strategic expansion into omnichannel retail, underscores its sustainable growth model. Licious's story is a masterclass in how addressing a core consumer problem can lead to building a large-scale business opportunity.The ET Soonicorns Summit 2025, India's largest congregation of soonicorns, returns for its fourth edition to Bengaluru on August 22, bringing together unicorn and soonicorn founders, investors, policymakers, and AI leaders for a day of sharp dialogue, bold ambition, and hard questions. With the theme 'From Research Labs to Revenue Models: The Billion-Dollar Blueprint for Scaling Indian AI Startups,' this year's edition is poised to redefine what scale means in the Indian context.360 ONE is the Presenting Partner of the ET Soonicorns Summit 2025, with Raymond as the Wardrobe Partner and Shiv Nadar University as the Ecosystem Partner.
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