Licious Brand: The India Tesla of Chicken.
3 min read
Licious founded in 2015 by Abhay Hanjura and Vivek Gupta that sells fresh meat and seafood online has become the first direct-to-consumer start-up to enter the coveted club of Unicorn, being the 29th start-up in the category after receiving $52 million in Series G funding round by IIFL.
The Licious business model is a Farm to Fork model which basically means it handles all the operations from supply chain to cold chain which includes procurement, processing, packaging, storage, and marketing of meat and meat-derived products.
Spread across 14 cities, the D2C unicorn recently said that its annual revenue run rate is estimated to be around Rs. 1000 crores with a customer base of more than 2 million unique customers of which 1.8 million are repeat customers! In its first year of operations in 2015, the startup had clocked in total revenue of only Rs. 1.47 crore, while doing about 1300 orders in one month. More than 90% of its orders come directly from its website and not from Amazon or BigBasket!
Nearly 70% of India’s population are meat and seafood eaters. The majority of this unorganized meat market is dependent on neighborhood vendors and is at times termed as unhygienic. The meat production industry is a crucial pillion to the agricultural setup. With the largest population of livestock in the world at around 515 million and with meat production estimated at 6.3 million tons annually, India is ranked 5th in terms of volume in production. This makes India responsible for 3% of the total meat produced in the world.
India being the 4th biggest seafood exporter in the world is also the 2nd largest aquaculture and fish producer in the world. The exports are estimated to be around $7 billion. The fresh meat and seafood sector is largely dominated by an unorganized sector with a potential worth around $50 billion. India is on track to become a $70 billion market for meat and seafood by 2022.
India’s per capita meat consumption is estimated to be around 5.2kg, India has the lowest per capita meat consumption in the world of which fish and chicken have taken the front seat, having the highest consumption rate.
What really is working for the category is the paradigm shift in the health-conscious individual for a fresh hygienic procurement process. The investment in the category holds a great promise for other start-ups to follow.
The real problem being solved by Licious wasn’t really of the long term ‘demand’, rather it was for consistency, and quality in ‘supply’. 90% of cold storage in India was dedicated to potatoes, veggies, etc. while most perishable meat items were kept out. Organizing the unorganized supply chains to take the meat out of the black polythene and assurance on higher quality, pleasant packaging that can be seamlessly delivered to the last mile on time has been the real problem to solve.
Today, Licious has 250 perishable items, and a 90-minute delivery promise to all customers across 110 delivery centers, from 5 processing centers.“If you are a Punjabi and I am a Kashmiri, the meaning of chicken curry is different for both of us. Therefore, we have a hyper-customized offering rather than mass personalization at scale” – Co-founder Abhay Hanjura. They have built algorithms in four major domains – past purchases, data analysis of people visiting their application and website, customer preference in browse categories, and product identification that were in most and least demand. These predictive analytics algorithms, reduced their wastage drastically from 40% to 3%, something their competition failed to do!
Post pandemic has really made everyone question their food patterns and dietary habits,.. so do you think the D2C meat brand will succeed in replacing the word “meat” in India’s dictionary with the word “Licious”?
