Licious: Providing Hygienic and Quality Meat at Your Doorstep


Making use of a great opportunity with the right team does lead to success. But identifying the right opportunity and acting on it isn’t a child’s play. Well, that’s where you gotta take risks, analyze the opportunity, and use your decision-making skills. You need to be cautious at each step forward but also be ready to take risks. Such is the journey of an entrepreneur. 

We present to you a yet interesting and aspiring entrepreneurial story that is based upon finding the right opportunity in the Indian market. They saw the chance of revolutionizing the Indian food sector by procuring a particular sector left untapped by the companies and largely dominated by the local vendors. 


Assessing the Problem


According to the global business intelligence firm Mintel, India is currently the second-largest processed meat and poultry industry, rising at 22 percent CAGR. The buying and selling of meat is still a stigmatized topic in India. Meat is covered in black plastic bags and is procured from the unhygienic slaughterhouses in the most crowded and dirtiest regions of the city.


Licious, an online gourmet meat startup, strives to bring meat to the limelight by uncovering the veil that covers it right now using technology and innovation. It is basically based on an end-to-end model that begins right from production to manufacturing, storage, and distribution of fresh produce. It aims at providing fresh, locally sourced meat and seafood that has been processed using globally accepted scientific techniques to satisfy the customers in the market largely dominated by frozen meat. 


Foundation


Licious was founded in July 2015 and officially launched in October by Abhay Hanjura and Vivek Gupta as its founding members. Both of them belong to different fields before embarking on the journey together. The self-proclaimed foodie duo realized the problems pertaining to the experience of purchasing meat in India and embarked on a journey to streamline the whole process of procuring meat. Moreover, they realized that the issue was a lack of trust that needs to be countered. Belong to different backgrounds of biotechnology and finance, they made use of the diverse set of skills that they possessed to make the startup a success. 


The company visions to become India's first meat brand and with doing so comes up a whole bunch of responsibilities. It aims at providing an alternative that can be consumed safely and even by pregnant women.


Product Development Breakdown


To achieve the same the company had set up testing labs where the procured meat is tested by meat scientists and make sure that the product is devoid of any steroids, antibiotics, and other harmful substances. Apart from these, cold power processing plants have also been established by the company with a team of specialized microbiologists and technologists. What separates Licious from other meat retailers or e-tailers is that it uses technology to keep track of every phase of the operation. Thus it maintains track of everything digitally for further analysis with the help of algorithms.


They have also developed a technology system that helps predict customer behavior in advance. Based on the behavioral trends that are gathered over time, the gourmet meat startup has developed around multiple algorithms that work to solve the labeled, chilled meat storage problem around the clock.


It is said that even an A+ idea can become a big failure if the team is not passionate enough and unwilling to take risks. That's why the founders had a hard time finding the right team as every step in building a startup is crucial. The first six months were spent to get the team and the product right. Another hurdle was to procuring meat at low costs. The company eventually overcame these with hard work and has managed to grow extensively now across 5 cities having 27 delivery centers.


Competitive Pricing


Talking about the pricing, the quality of meat typically depends on the breed of the bird as well as the feed provided to it. The way the bird is brought up determines the quality of meat. Keeping the price lower than the market requires compromising on the quality. Licious kept its quality quotient high and with time, as production scaled up prices reduced along with cost reduction techniques at various stages of meat procurement.

In this way, it was able to adjust with the supply and demand price mechanism of the market and offer an affordable price to its customers for quality meat and seafood.


Current Scenario of the Company


Currently, the company has more than 300K satisfied customers across the country with a daily average of 5500 orders. Almost 90% of their business now relies on repeat orders that showcases consumer satisfaction and trust in the brand. Moreover, the company relies on word of mouth marketing for its product rather than other strategies having faith in the product and service they offer. They have been able to generate significant profits which tend to be increasing rapidly with time. The company currently has a team of over 600 members and strategizing to expand further. 


In addition to expanding its geographic reach, the works also include new product categories, recipes, and catalogs, particularly in the ready-to-eat vertical. To that end, it's now looking to partner with retailers and other brick-and-mortar vendors to expand consumer penetration of the collection.


Conclusion


The company has established itself quite well as a meat brand and gained consumers’ trust. With new companies also venturing in the field, they will have certain other challenges to overcome too but that's all part of the business. It is an interesting story that inspires us to identify opportunities existing in the market. With determination, passion, and the right team any good opportunity can be made into a success story. But don't get disheartened from failures too, they are just part of the process and you will learn amazing things from these experiences. 


Read this article on An Entrepreneurial Journey: Never be Afraid of Failure to read about another inspiring story.

Also do give a read on The Impetus Given to Startups to get a glimpse of the various problems faced by startups.

Want to know about more inspiring startup stories, read this article on Top 11 Entrepreneurship Startup Success Stories.


Written By -  Bhanu Jain

Edited By -  Kashish Chadha