Her parents were worried (If you do this, how will we get you married?) when she told them about her plans to break one of the last male bastions: opening an abattoir. In July 2015, Shruti Gocchwal co-founded a start-up, Zappfresh, India’s first e-market for delivery of fresh meat.

Based in Gurugram, it is now planning to expand to five other cities next year. “We are evaluating the meat markets in Chennai, Chandigarh, Jaipur, Mumbai and Kolkata and will take a final decision in 2019,” Gocchwal, Co-founder and Director, Zappfresh, told BusinessLine .

Market size

The company, which gets around 2,000 orders online every day, is currently delivering products in the Delhi-NCR region.

According to industry estimates, the market for Indian meat and poultry is pegged at $31 billion, and expected to grow at 20 per cent CAGR to $65 billion by 2022.

The fish and seafood market is pegged at $20 billion with an expected growth at 15 per cent CAGR. Only 10 per cent of this combined market is organised.

So far, Zappfresh has raised ₹27 crore, including ₹20 crore in pre-Series A funding from Amit Burman, Vice-Chairman, Dabur India, and SIDBI Venture Capital.

It aims to transform the highly unorganised and male-dominated meat industry in India that has seen little government intervention. It has also invested in technology to forecast demand.

“We are also a halal-certified company and hire Muslims to prepare this meat,” Gocchwal said.

Zappfresh is focusing only on the domestic market, not exports. She is responsible for the brand’s logistics and operations, right from sourcing to the last-mile deliveries, besides leading the start-up’s financials.

Deepanshu Manchanda, co-founder, said this is the only sector in which funding does not necessarily aim at territorial expansion. “We cannot transport supplies from one city to another. Supply must be locally procured to maintain freshness. We work closely with animal-raising farms and apply stringent criteria to establish Zappfresh as a safe, healthy and fresh farm-to-fork meat brand.”

They said Zappfresh, a technology-integrated start-up, aims to transform the meat buying experience for Indian consumers through its well-maintained, end-to-end supply chain. “Our products come only from high-quality farms equipped with innovative technologies to ensure healthy growth of animals. Animals and farms are supervised by food technologists and farm specialists. Animals are fed on high-quality vegetarian diet and clean water.”

It maintains the temperature of the meat till its delivery at customer’s doorsteps, thus ensuring its freshness for a longer time as meat is a perishable product with a short shelf-life. The startup currently supplies chicken — its biggest revenue earner — mutton, seafood, pre-cooked and cold cuts. “Our products are 100 per cent free of chemicals, antibiotics, preservatives and growth hormones.”

Product delivery

It procures fresh meat from local farms, gets it slaughtered in hygienic plants, customises the cuts as per demand and delivers it within a prescribed time-frame, with the help of its associate ColdEX, a cold chain company. For these local supplies, they said, Zappfresh partners with farms to procure high-quality meat from the best breeds, bypasses the local mandis, wholesalers or butchers’ shops.

The idea for this start-up came when the duo found that local butchers and suppliers had created a monopoly in the system, with a majority of them selling stale meat to the unsuspecting consumers. Moreover, maintaining freshness was yet another issue in the absence of standardisation at the farming level.

The meat available from local vendors and supermarkets is often highly processed and from animals raised under unhygienic conditions of common feedlots and overburdened slaughterhouses. Animals in these feedlots are treated with antibiotics to hide illnesses and growth hormones to increase production. Preservatives and chemicals are added to the products to increase shelf-life.

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