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Time of India
5 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
ET Soonicorns Summit 2025: Licious founders on building India's first scaled meat brand
Academy Empower your mind, elevate your skills 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
Hans India
03-06-2025
- Business
- Hans India
Amid Seasonal Fishing Bans, Licious Keeps Seafood Flowing with Robust Coast-to-Coast Supply Chain
Bengaluru: As seasonal fishing bans have come into effect on India's coasts, D2C meat and seafood brand Licious rerouted procurement from multiple active coasts to maintain seafood availability across urban markets amid supply drops and price spikes in multiple states. The 61-day bans in place from April 15 to June 14 on the East Coast and from June 1 to July 31 on the West Coast enable marine ecosystems to regenerate in peak breeding season. This has led to supply visibly reducing with wet markets & traditional vendors. This has led to price rises of 40% to 80% in markets with consumers purchasing for household consumption across Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and other areas. Licious' supply chain strategy combines daily-demand forecasting, regional rerouting, and one of India's first and most advanced 0-4 degrees centigrade cold chains, enabling continued availability when others scale down. 'Our goal isn't to bypass the system, but to work within it. We choose to source same day catch from small boats and follow all government regulations when it comes to mechanised trawling while meeting customer demand across 20+ cities. During the ban, we leverage our in-house planning and demand forecasting mechanisms for an agile supply chain. In practice, that means moving fish from Kochi to Delhi overnight or rerouting via Tuticorin when East Coast hubs are restricted,' said Abhay Hanjura and Vivek Gupta, Founders - Licious. Licious sources from multiple landing sites across Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Karnataka, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Odisha, and Goa - reducing overfishing and ensuring availability with 150+ cuts of fish and seafood. The company moves its inventory using a combination of truck, rail, and air transport, supported by a national cold chain infrastructure maintained at 0-4°C to keep products fresh and not frozen. Unlike the broader market, which sees product shortages in this period, Licious' graded and quality-assured range assures availability of 94 fish species. This includes favourites like Seer, Pomfret, Anchovies, Mackerals, and Pink Perch among others. Underlying the Licious supply chain is a demand model built on hyperlocal insights too; e.g., Vishu in Kerala drives demand for specific regional catches, while Bengali-dominated neighborhoods see spikes in freshwater fish consumption around Poila Boishakh. India's fish and seafood industry remains largely unorganised, with supply chains vulnerable to seasonality, policy driven restrictions, and logistical complications. With marine fish shelf life being extremely short, forecasting errors lead to waste, and that is what the Licious network is designed to prevent. Our operations during the fishing ban also point to an alternative approach that is both compliance-first and demand-led.
Reuters
18-02-2025
- Business
- Reuters
Temasek-backed Indian startup Licious plans IPO in 2026, eyes $2 billion valuation, says source
Feb 18(Reuters) - Indian online meat and seafood retailer Licious is looking to debut on the bourses in the next 12-18 months and is targeting a valuation of $2 billion, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Tuesday. The IPO plan comes at a time when quick commerce is booming in the country, as more shoppers prioritise convenience and speed and are opting for 10-minute deliveries. Licious, backed by Singapore's state-owned investment firm Temasek, also sells its products on quick commerce platforms such as Swiggy's ( opens new tab Instamart and Zomato-owned ( opens new tab Blinkit. Licious founders Abhay Hanjura and Vivek Gupta said in a statement that they are on their journey to being an IPO-ready company. "We are focused on scaling the business by expanding markets, distribution channels, and products. To achieve this, we are aggressively growing our brick-and-mortar presence, targeting 500 stores in the next five years and expanding our ready-to-cook and ready-to-eat range," the statement said. The Bengaluru-based company was valued at $1.5 billion at its last funding round in 2023. It also counts Avendus Capital, and Bertelsmann Investments among its investors. Licious' loss narrowed to 2.98 billion rupees in fiscal 2024 from 5.29 billion rupees loss in 2023, data from Tracxn showed. Revenue declined to 6.87 billion rupees from 7.48 billion rupees in 2023. IPOs in India, which saw a record-run in 2024, have offered investors scant returns this year, with 60% of the companies that have listed on the BSE bourse trading at a discount to their IPO price, stock exchange data showed. Meanwhile, the benchmark Nifty 50 index (.NSEI), opens new tab, has fallen 2.96% so far this year and slid about 12.5% from its all-time closing high in September, amid concerns over a corporate earnings slowdown, sustained foreign selling, and worries about U.S. tariffs and fewer Federal Reserve rate cuts.
