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Time of India
2 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.
The Star
13-06-2025
- Business
- The Star
Invisible stores, instant shopping
In the sprawling financial hub of Mumbai, armies of 'dabbawalas' have for decades crisscrossed the city by foot and bicycle, delivering home-cooked food to office workers who are keen to avoid the searing heat and traffic-snarled streets. Now, across the country, young entrepreneurs are taking that tradition to the next level with the explosion of shopping apps that allow customers to get hold of not only food and drink but anything else from clothes to iPhones – within minutes. The so-called quick commerce apps are redefining the retail game, not only disrupting e-commerce titans such as Amazon with their speed and efficiency but also long-established 'mom and pop' stores, which are no longer convenient enough. At a warehouse managed by online grocer BigBasket in central Mumbai, employees work with military-like precision to pull off deliveries in just 10 minutes. These warehouses are known within the industry as 'dark stores', a reference to being closed off to customers. When a new order is received, a worker leaps into action, darting through aisles filled with everything from fizzy drinks to vegetables, packing a bag of groceries handed to a motorbike rider – the modern-day 'dabbawala', Hindi for 'lunchbox man'. Local tech companies have poured in billions to set up these nifty logistical networks across big cities, fuelling India's rapid shopping industry. 'Unprecedented' For millions of customers, it's an easy way to avoid shopping in the sweltering heat – visiting multiple food stalls – and spending hours navigating the country's notorious traffic jams. Growth has been 'very strong', BigBasket co-founder Vipul Parekh said, pointing to forecasts that indicate a compounded annual growth rate of more than 60% over the next two to three years. 'When you talk of a large industry transforming and growing at this pace, that is unprecedented,' he said. Delivery apps such as Getir or Jokr have faltered in Europe and the United States in recent years, as pandemic-induced demand wore off and rising inflation pinched customer wallets. But sales in India have soared from US$100mil in 2020 to an estimated US$6bil in 2024, according to projections by market analysis firm Datum Intelligence. This could hit US$40bil by the end of the decade, according to investment bank JM Financial. Companies say India's quick commerce's growth is partly down to the sheer scale of people living in tight-packed cities within a roughly 2km radius of a 'dark store', said Parekh. 'The revenue potential in that catchment is very high,' he said. A lack of many traditional supermarket grocery chains in India aid the business model, he said. Rinish Ravindra, a regular user, admits that they make him 'lazy', but argues that the convenience is unbeatable. 'I just press a bunch of keys and all of it comes delivered to home,' says the 32-year-old, who works in Mumbai's film industry. Local players have made rapid progress but competition is heating up. Amazon is getting its act together, along with Walmart-owned Flipkart and billionaire Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries as they belatedly roll out rapid delivery offerings. 'One of the problems with e-commerce players like Amazon is that, until now, they've relied on these big fulfilment centres that sit on the outside or outskirts of cities,' said Satish Meena of Datum Intelligence. 'These aren't suited for rapid delivery, which is why they now need to invest to build their own dark store networks within urban areas.' 'Just order it online' However, a more crowded industry threatens the sustainability of the sector that has already seen one prominent start-up go bust. 'My sense is that the market is good enough for two to three players,' said Rahul Malhotra of Bernstein, a research firm, adding that the total addressable market may be worth around US$50bil to US$60bil. 'Some of the early movers, with hyperlocal capabilities obviously, have an advantage here.' The sector could also face challenges from thousands of small, family-run shops. The Confederation of All India Traders, a leading industry group that claims to represent over 90 million small businesses, has called for 'a nationwide movement' against newer platforms. Its president likened quick commerce to being a 'modern-day East India Company', a reference to the rapacious British power that began in the 17th century to seize swathes of India, preceding colonial rule. For now, customers are voting with their wallets. 'When I think of groceries, I think, 'I can just order it online',' said Ravindra. — AFP
