“How country delight is changing the consumer choices in Tamil Nadu to Live better”
Chennai : India’s fresh food and staples market is expected to cross $50Bn+ by 2025. Today, over 60% of the fresh foods market is unorganized with limited cold storage capabilities, fragmented logistics chain and inadequate visibility of product quality across the supply chain. Country Delight with its quality first DNA and tech enabled supply chain aims to solve these challenges.
Country Delight Country delight (CD) is a tech-driven direct to home consumer brand that delivers products that help consumers live better. Natural wellness is at the core of country delight’s product DNA. Every product that we serve is Natural viz. Pure (No Middle Men), Fresh (Fully owned supply chain) and Minimally Processed(As close to home-made as possible). Country Delight has done ~8 million deliveries per month across 15 cities with supply chain that spans across 11 states in the country.
The packaged and processed food items have become a part and parcel of our lives, we are consuming food products that contain additives and preservatives on a daily basis risking our health. The WHO report ala rmi ngly revealed that 28% of food samples were adulterated and that adulteration had doubled since 2012 in India. Country Delight has taken a tech-driven and consumer-centric approach to solve this problem by delivering Natural, Fresh and Minimally processed food-essentials sourced directly from farmers present across the country and deliver to the doorstep of consumers every single day. It has grown to become India’s leading D2C fresh food essentials brand offering dairy, fruits & vegetables to the doorstep of consumers. The company’s business model ensures fresh deliveries in 24-36 hours facilitated by a fully integrated just-in-time supply chain model. And that has also enabled us to launch products which fit into that whole farm to table concept.
The primary problem that a farmer faces because of conservative wholesale markets is that of price hikes and the degradation of the quality of the products and to top it all the problem of time is still unsolved. Agriculture engages about 50% of the workforce and provides food security for the nation, yet it recorded only a 4% growth. Currently majority of students graduating from agricu ltural universities switch to other professions. While this gene ration is reaching the age of retirement, the next one does not want to farm.
“On the supply side, from the beginning, Country Delight has been built on the philosophy of working with a le sser set of stakeholders, where you have access to relatively higher quantities, where you have access to be tter quality produce, which comes in two or three formats, It means working and choosing the right medium-sized and large-sized farms. The idea is to select farms which have better hygiene practices, who have better cold-chain practices, who have higher adoption to technology when it comes to better quality milking, and all this leads to a better product fundamentally at the source”, Says Mr. Chakradhar Gade, Co- Founder, Country Delight.
The team has also started working with IoT integration. This gives real-time updates on the bacterial growth, which the team is receiving with all quality parameters and all payment parameters. At the core, Country Del ight works as a subscription-based business, which offers a highly recurring revenue. Country Delight is believed in creating a fundamentally sustainable business. Tamil Nadu is a major source for Country Delight, the Pollachi tender coconuts are the hero products of Country Delight besides engaging with local farmers and milk prod ucers for the farm fresh products from TN. Country Delight is currently focussed on TN market and intends to strengthen its business in Chennai, Coimbatore and other major cities of the state.
About Country Delight
Country Delight was started in 2015, by Chakradhar Gade (CEO & Co-founder) graduated from IIM and started his career with Infosys and then worked at financial services’ firm Indxx Capital Management and Nitin Kaushal (COO & Co-founder) also graduated from IIM. Customer first thinking, tech-driven problem solving and Owne rship driven team building are the key values on which country delight has been built. There has been a stable growth and today Country Delight is 1500 employees strong. The rapid pace continued after the pandemic and clocked operating revenue of ₹321 crore in FY21, the brand is likely to end FY22 at ₹600 crore. Country Delight has raised $108 million in a Series D funding round led by Nicholas Cator-backed Venturi Partners and Temasek. The round also saw participation from SWC Global and Trifecta Capital along with IIFL Asset Management, El evation Capital, Orios Venture Partners, and Matrix Partners.
