India’s largest hyperlocal and omnichannel meat retail brand Nandu’s aims to raise 15 million US dollars to fuel its expansion plans Pan-India in about three years and aims to become a Rs 2000-crore company by 2025.
“Having bootstrapped until now, we are looking to raise 15 million US dollars to fuel our expansion plans Pan-India in about three years time,” Nandu’s Founder and CEO Narendra Pasuparthy told NFAPost in an exclusive interview held at its processing unit in Bengaluru.
Company COO Vinay Gopinath said: “We are looking to be a Rs 2000 crore company by 2025 with a staff of around 3500 to 4000 people. And we are going to cater meat to 2.5 million households across the country by that time.”
The company is programmed to execute on this model because it is a totally integrated meat company, Pasuparthy said. “From feed manufacturing, breeding farms, hatcheries, slaughtering, processing, and retailing – everything comes under one umbrella. So, having a consistent supply of meat is critical to scale our brand, and we are in this business for the last 50 years,” he added.
Gopinath said the firm plans to expand in two phases. “In next two years, we plan to open 300 Nandu’s outlets in four cities. We now have outlets only in Bengaluru. In seven years, we plan to open 605 outlets in six new cities – Hyderabad, a city in Kerala, Delhi NCR, Pune, Mumbai, and Chennai,” he added.
Meat is a huge opportunity in India and it is 44 billion dollars estimated size of the market and is growing around 10 percent per annum, which is huge, Narendra said.
Also, Gopinath said, it is the most underserved retail segment in India. For example, there only 2050 slaughterhouses in Bengaluru, and therefore, the opportunity is huge, he added.
He also said the firm currently is on Dunzo and Swiggy, and very soon it plans to be on Flipkart and Amazon to scale the business.
Responding to a query, Pasuparthy said the company has made rapid strides from 2017 to 2021, despite India being in the grips of the Covid pandemic last year. The firm is about to close its book with Rs 50 crore this fiscal, he said.
“We are going to close this fiscal with Rs 50 crore which is double what we had closed last year. We are going to change the meat business in India. There is no doubt about it,” he said.
“In the 1990s, my father had closed the business for a year because of the lack of freezing infrastructure in India. However, in 2017, I set up Nandu’s like the retail arm of the Nanda Group, a Rs 500 crore company that was already an established brand in the poultry farming industry in India for over five decades.
“From 2017 to 2021, the journey has been fascinating. The firm has seen tremendous growth with the availability of technologies to find solutions to our business problems. Initially, we were confused when the pandemic hit India, but by April last, things started to get clear. Since the consumers were behind the closed doors, the order for our products went high, because of the people becoming conscious about eating hygienic and healthy food,” he said.
Moreover, at the backend, Pasuparthy said, the firm would be supporting thousands of farmers who will be producing fish, chicken, and mutton. “We are going to put fair price and mantra of integrated farming on their table. As of today, we have 250 farmers growing exclusively for Nandu’s. The income for them is sure throughout the year without any vagaries of market activities,” he said.
“In a sense, it is not only about the consumers and the investors, but also about making a massive change in the entire ecosystem that we operate in – the farmers’ and consumers’ ecosystem,” he added.
