Licious: The Company Plans to Take its Value Offerings to NCR by Q4 2016 (Jan - March).

BW Disrupt interacts with Licious Founders, Abhay Hanjura & Vivek Gupta, who founded their startup in August 2015

Licious brings to its consumers a wide variety of high quality meat, seafood and their products, sourced, processed and home delivered as per global standards. The portfolio is a mix of tasty and healthy products.

Powered by technology, Licious delivers fresh meat, seafood and its innovative products (Easy to cook, 10 mins meal & Spreads) within 120 minutes of ordering through either the web site or the Licious app. Licious is India’s first meat brand known for its phenomenal product quality using technology to bring distinct experience to consumer.

How was the initial journey started off?
Being passionate about food, whenever Abhay and Vivek ordered meat from various restaurants it often lacked the desired texture and flavour. While researching more about the quality of meat, they found a discord wherein most restaurants used frozen meat for food preparations.

Abhay Hanjura and Vivek Gupta started Licious as they sensed a huge business opportunity in supplying quality and hygienic fresh meat that was otherwise dominated by the frozen meat category.

The company began with the aim of satisfying customers with the finest and freshest meat, seafood and related products. The current action in the consumer space has created a landscape for convenience in ordering through technology and the service proposition of door-delivery. Licious is right at the cusp of this, and is poised to create a sustainable solution for its patrons.

The consumer has evolved now. With a drastic increase in the number of Indians travelling around the world, there is much exposure to modern eating habits. This has brought about a paradigm shift in the meat buying and consuming patterns. This is where Licious fits in as a high quality meat and seafood brand.

The company follows an end-to-end business based on the hub and spoke model that starts from procuring directly from the farms to processing, storage and delivery. Through this entire supply chain, the freshness and quality of the product is strictly maintained till the delivery at the doorstep of the consumer.

The distribution of product is managed in a manner that there is zero-inventory. Licious ensures the product does not stay in cold storage for more than 4 hours guaranteeing that the quality is not compromised. The company also has a strict quality check in control.

How are they different from the existing players?
Licious also brings transparency to consumers from providing insightful tips on particular meat cuts to inquiring about recipes and sharing cooking tips on their website and app. Licious is known for its innovation and is continuously inventing new product ranges like Easy to cook, 10 mins meals and spreads.

One of the main obstacles the organisation faced initially was changing the mind-set of the consumer. With Licious being the first branded high quality meat and seafood tech start-up, there was initial hesitation from the consumers to move from an offline to an online market.

However, after ten months of operations, we have witnessed a profound shift in the perception of the consumers to the brand which is attributed to the premium quality of products that Licious offers. The consumers have adopted the online model and are now observing that Licious is synonymous with meat.

As a business, we are cash sufficient. However, in-order to scale to other cities, we need capital. We are a high quality fresh and value added meat product company and all our revenues come from the sale of our wide range of products. As a company we did unlock some value through VC funding which has propelled this growth and turned us profitable within 10 months of starting operations in Bengaluru.

Future Plans & Ideas
Licious clocks in around 30,000 orders every month with just being over a year old in the market. Licious has cracked the Bangalore market and the current focus is to scale the business to strengthen its market leadership position in Bangalore. The company plans to take its value offerings to NCR by Q4 2016 (Jan - March).

The marketing plan consists of a four-fold approach, Experiential, Engagement, Adoption and Acquisition. With a holistic approach Licious is aiming to push the customer to the next level of the experiential pyramid to engagement.

All these plans are apart from the regular and ongoing BTL and online activities. With these activities Licious aims to create a high level of exposure for the company and its products as well as an opportunity for the consumer’s response.

With a population of 1.3 billion, 72% belong to the non-vegetarian eating population. The Indian meat market is close to $30 billion with India being the largest exporter of meat.