Online fresh meat and seafood brand Licious opened its first 300 sq ft meat and seafood experience centre at the high-footfall Galleria Market in Gurugram on Thursday.

Designed to change the typical Indian experience of buying meat and seafood, the centre is equipped to take customers through the entire farm-to-fork journey of meat and seafood by trained meat consultants, who also elaborate on the company’s responsible and sustainable sourcing processes and answer all queries on traceability and quality of products.

“Repeated requests from customers to touch and feel our products, and multiple questions they posed to us about how we source our meat, etc, prompted us to start our offline journey. We want to be an omni-channel brand and plan to open 7-8 more such centres over the next year,” Vivek Gupta, co-founder of Licious, told BusinessLine . He said the centre is also completely knife-free, offering only pre-packed products brought directly from the production plant to ensure no compromise on quality and hygiene. The centre’s ‘Endless Aisle’ feature allows customers to place orders on a virtual kiosk for products not available at the centre, which will be delivered at their doorsteps in 90 minutes.

Safety norms

“The typical meat buying experience in India is all about crowded markets, dingy lanes and the frantic search for quality products. Our experience centre is nothing like a traditional meat or seafood store and is completely compliant with the global food safety and hygiene norms,” said Abhay Hanjura, co-founder, Licious.

Over the last four years, Licious, which operates in a highly fragmented, unorganised industry valued at $40 billion, claims to have served over 6 lakh customers across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Delhi-NCR, Chandigarh, Mumbai and Pune through online and app-based purchase.

The start-up owns the entire back-end supply chain powered by stringent cold chain control to maintain the quality and freshness of each product from the time of procurement, processing and storage to the time it reaches the end-consumer.

Value-added products

It has introduced a range of valued-added products to its fresh meat and seafood portfolio, such as spreads, marinades and pickles, and launched ready-to-fry meat and seafood pakoras on Eid.

For FY19, Licious posted a revenue of ₹110 crore, processing 2.25 lakh orders a month at an average order value of ₹600.

It raised two rounds of $25 million each in Series C and Series D funding in September and December 2018 respectively with a total of $64 million raised to date. It competes with FreshToHome, Nandu’s Chicken, EasyMeat and ZappFresh, among others.