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Since launching Fresh To Home, an e-commerce platform for preservative and antibiotic residue-free fresh fish and meat that operates in India and the UAE, in 2015, its co-founder and CEO Kadavil has succeeded in achieving a number of important results- FreshtoHome now has more than 3.5 million registered users across the UAE and India, it offers more than 2,000 certified fresh and chemical-free products, it has delivered more than two million orders across more than 160 cities. And the big news is also that it recently raised US$104 million in a Series D funding round, with Amazon Smbhav Venture Fund, a $250 million India-focused venture fund, leading it. “The current funding will strengthen our mission to make 100% preservative- and antibiotic residue-free fish, seafood, and meat accessible and affordable to millions of meat lovers,” Kadavil says.
Today, Fresh To Home is a brand that is recognized for its quality, consumer trust, and technology-enabled offering. “Our Commodities Exchange empowers over 4,000 fishers and farmers to electronically auction their produce for sale on our platform,” Kadavil says. “This process ensures that customers get the best products within 24–36 hours of sourcing. Additionally, an end-to-end cold supply chain and 100+ quality checks for standard chemicals, antibiotics, and preservatives, make FreshToHome enable access to only safe and healthy products that adhere to national and international food regulatory standards and are certified by reputed agencies.”
For Kadavil, 2022 was a learning curve “as there has been a shift in customer purchase patterns in the last 12-15 months,” as he explains. “For instance, we have witnessed rapid growth in smaller towns, and some of the tier-two cities in India, registered over 100% growth in 2022,” Kadavil adds. “Also, we enabled the launch of the Clean Label range of preservative-free ready-to-cook and ready-to-eat snacks, and we are witnessing huge traction in this category.”
However, the company recently scored a major win – its Series D round marks the official entry of Amazon in the branded direct-to-consumer space, while it also brought the support of its existing investors, including Iron Pillar, Investcorp, Investment Corporation of Dubai, Ascent Capital, as well as new investors like E20 Investment Ltd, Mount Judi Ventures, and Dallah Albaraka. Two years ago, FreshToHome had raised $121 million in a Series C round, led by Dubai’s Investment Corporation of Dubai, Investcorp, IronPillar, Ascent Capital and US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC).
“As a growing startup, fundraising at different stages helped us strengthen our core mission to make fresh fish and meat affordable and accessible to all meat lovers, while also increasing the wealth of investors,” Kadavil explains. New investments have added heft to envision the tech infrastructure we wanted to build to enable user-friendly tech solutions to our fishers community in order to eliminate the dependency on the middlemen. Our Series C round helped us to become a pan-India brand, expanding our presence geographically, and eventually getting us a brand closer to our customers upholding our mission of providing toxin-free food to the next million.”
Source: Fresh To Home
In the UAE, FreshToHome operates with a full-fledged sorting and processing centre, engaging a direct and indirect workforce of more than 400 people, and delivering across the country. “The UAE contributes nearly 15% revenue share and holds a focus area with great potential,” Kadavil says. “I should say that it is because we have an early mover advantage in the UAE e-commerce landscape. We function as a local homegrown company, and thereby, we have clearly grown and maintained our customer loyalty to become their favorite ‘fresh’ brand, owing to the promised quality including safety, variety, and cooking convenience we offer in our platform. We optimize our sourcing, and ensure a farm-to-fork cycle is less than 24-36 hours for our customers in the UAE.”
His next target is Saudi Arabia, in addition to strengthening the company’s offline and online channels, and deepen its sourcing advantage to add value to our customers and other stakeholders.
However, we are interested to learn from Kadavil how he joined the trend of “proficorns,” meaning profitable companies that signal a strong shift away from unicorns. His first piece of advice is to balance growth with profitability. “From the start, we believed that while top-line growth is important, bottom-line is equally important,” Kadavil explains. “Bottom-line focus does require a strong moat, along with stellar execution to drive the differentiation, so it’s not enough just to have a good brand, or it will be hard to run a profitable company. The key driver is the value to customers and farmers along with emphasis on business margins.”
Secondly, he advises founders to focus on technology, explaining that he also heavily relied on artificial intelligence (AI)-based technology to disrupt the traditional sourcing industry. “This was a win-win for the farmers and fishers, and the consumers,” Kadavil says. “To give you our example, most of our time and investments in the last seven years went into building a fishers-facing tech platform on the sourcing side, working with over 4000 fishermen and farmers, cutting off middlemen, and enabling them to sell directly on our commodity exchange platform.”
Lastly, to build a profitable company, Kadavil advises, its founder needs to put stakeholders at the core of its business model. “The fishers community, our customers, and our investors have been the foundation of our business model, and at every stage, we have strived to create value for all our stakeholders,” he adds. “By focusing on a robust cold supply chain to reduce waste, ensuring prompt payment to fishers so that they do not knock money lending sharks, we were able to pass on the benefits to our customers and enhance our margins with a win-win situation to all.”
This article is from Entrepreneur.com
