With the Make in India campaign turning out to be not only viable but profitable too, homegrown businesses, whether based out of cities or located in the hinterland, have come into their own. Celebrating both start-ups and legacy brands, the e4m Pride of India Brand series explores the bright future these companies hold. In this edition of the series, we speak to the brand leadership of FreshToHome to know more about their journey and the plans ahead.
With a mission of providing fresh and preservative-free meat and seafood, techie-turned entrepreneurs Shan Kadavil and Matthew Joseph, both hailing from Kerala, founded Freshtohome in 2015.
The Bengaluru-based brands Statistics Report for 2021 said having clocked in more than two million orders per month for the year, the brand has received and successfully processed 1 order per second. In addition to this, the brand has added over 8 lakh new meat lovers in 2021. Vanda Ferrao, Head of Marketing, says FreshToHomes clear success is driven by a commitment to their brand promise - 100% Fresh, 0% Chemicals.
Our founders began the company because they believed that India deserved better meat. So FreshToHome started this journey with the sole purpose of procuring and vending the freshest possible non-vegetarian products, which were not treated by any kind of chemical or preservative, directly to consumers, no matter which part of India they were in, says Ferrao, adding that FreshToHome controls the entire process from sourcing directly from fishermen and farmers to shipping and delivering it to the customers' doorsteps in the shortest possible time.
These products reach from farms or the sea to customers homes in less than 36 hours, and even within 24, a feat achieved by FreshToHomes large-scale investment in cold chain management. We stand by our commitment to deliver antibiotic-free, preservative-free fresh meats and seafood. There is a huge opportunity here, as this is potentially an 80-billion-dollar industry, but is riddled with challenges. Over 90% of the sector is unorganized and when the company started there werent really any branded companies in the fresh meat industry, she said.
Today, FreshToHome says it is the largest vertically integrated e-commerce company in the fish and meat space in the world, delivering over two million orders a month across 90 cities in India and all of the UAE. The platform enables partners to source meat and fish directly from livestock farmers and fishermen, and then supply fresh produce at mass-market prices in all major Indian markets, including Delhi/NCR, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune, Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
We have a network of 3,000 fishermen and farmers from 300 coasts and livestock farms across India from whom we source our seafood and meats. We control the entire backend which enables us to deliver the best products to our two million-plus happy monthly customers, says Ferrao.
She further notes that since 70 per cent of Indians consume some kind of non-vegetarian food there has been a tremendous market opportunity for FreshToHome, and it has made the most of it in terms of increasing its consumer base. The genesis was with fish. Seafood is the toughest product when it comes to selling freshness, and thanks to our built-up network we have been able to deliver on that.
We began in Bengaluru and built our way up and, in fact, some of our earliest customers have been our biggest advocates as I think nothing beats positive word of mouth when it comes to helping your brand grow. We made our way into other cities and began increasing our portfolio, starting with mutton and fish, and then moving on to value-added products, including our range of ready-to-eat dishes, which were also expanding, Ferrao elaborated.
The ready-to-eat category, in fact, has seen tremendous growth, with Ferrao saying, We wanted to translate our fresh offerings into value-added products without using chemicals. Were Indias first clean label brand in our segment, and our endeavour is definitely to penetrate deeper into India.
Were rolling out our physical stores as well, and plan to open 200 outlets across India this year. Well also be expanding our presence in other markets in the Middle East, and grow our footprint within India itself. Metros have always been strong customer bases of course, and weve also grown in Tier-I, Tier-II cities, but have also seen traction in smaller cities and towns, says Ferraro.
When it comes to advertising, FreshToHome has utilized every medium, be it print, radio, television or digital. According to Ferrao, television has played an especially important role in growing the brands market, particularly in the recent past.
We use a robust mix of media, though as a pan-Indian brand, TV has been especially useful in reaching out to the masses. What were doing is category creation wherein were coaxing customers to switch from buying their meats offline to online and weve found TV to be especially impactful when it comes to that. We recently forayed into advertising during big-ticket, high impact events like the IPL and saw a spike in both consumer awareness as well as orders.
Studying their own established metrics, the brand found a significant increase in brand awareness, which has made them confident that people are buying what theyre selling. We have a lot of levers right now, which were fairly confident are going to fuel growth for us. Geographical expansion is definitely going to be an element as will be the introduction of new product categories, even as we increase our advertising pan-India, Ferrao concluded.
FreshToHome has attracted large-scale funding, especially from Bahrain-based Investcorp in the last two years. It is expected to become a unicorn (a company evaluated at one billion dollars-plus) in the near future, especially given its robust expansion plans.
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FreshToHome is Indias first Clean Label brand in our segment & we will penetrate deeper - Exchange4Media