Why did we back E-feed?

(Animal nutrition-centric platform empowering farmers with quality feed and data, bringing traceability in animal nutrition value chain)

Huddle

Dec 02, 2022

Founded Year: 2021

Website: https://www.efeed.in/

Founders: Kumar Ranjan, Ravi Chauhan

Raised: $530k

Backers: Huddle, Omnivore, Better Capital

About E-Feed

EFeed was founded on the premise of enabling commerce in India’s rising animal-feed industry. It aims to disrupt conventional supply chains in the animal feed business through its direct-to-farmer model, capitalizing on ensuring easy access of animal feed from manufacturers to farmers, in a timely, efficient, and transparent manner.

EFeed is tackling current challenges in existing conventional supply chains, by offering a full-stack feed procurement platform, designed to ensure cost efficiency to each unique stakeholder: Manufacturers, Retailers, and Farmers.

Platform

Digital Commerce: The platform has been designed to provide visibility and transparency for fish farmers that are in need of feed on a rotational basis. Functions include:

Timely Delivery
Quality Assurance
Trusted E-commerce
24/7 Customer Support
Access to farming experts

Content and Community

In order to maximize network effects within farming communities, EFeed has put content aggregation and community engagement at the forefront of its acquisition strategy. Through a combination of Facebook Groups, Whatsapp Groups, Youtube Channels, and In-app content, it has successfully proven high engagement rates within the farmer community.

The opportunity at hand

Sunrise Sector and Policy Support

The Indian Feed industry is an $18bn market opportunity. Globally, the Aquaculture market is valued at $169bn and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 5.3%. NABARD estimates that only 58% of inland fisheries’ potential has been harnessed so far, giving ample room for growth, through promotional, development, and subsidy-driven government programs.

The Blue Revolution: The recent restructuring of the Neel Kranti mission has allowed immense scope for Fisheries and Aquaculture in India. With multi-faceted activities, the scheme mainly focuses on increasing fisheries production (both marine and inland) through farmer welfare schemes, post-harvest assistance, institutional arrangements for fisheries, strengthening databases, and much more.
PMMSY (Pradhan Mantri Matsya Sampada Yojana): Announced in the Union Budget of 2019, PMMSY aims to provide policy, marketing, and infrastructure support for aquaculture activities. Per EFeed’s observations, PMMSY has given a tremendous boost to local feed manufacturers and helped them reach farmers directly.

PMMSY → enabling direct benefit to local manufacturers in reaching fish farmers directly.

Growth Drivers

E-commerce Ready: The average fish farmer earns twice as much as crop farmers. Evidence suggests widespread penetration of smartphones in farming communities, resulting in ease of adoption for e-commerce, using popular social media channels (WhatsApp, Facebook)
Growing trust of digital payment gateways and net banking: On-ground evidence suggests growing trust for popular digital payment options like NEFT, UPI, and PayTM enabling digital commerce.
Gamification: Smartphone penetration has allowed scope for online consumerism and gamification among farming communities.

Why Huddle Invested in E-Feed

Fisheries and Aquaculture is a sunrise sector that has seen spectacular growth over the past few decades, with an estimated fish production of 14.15 MMT (Million Metric Tonnes) in 2020, contributing to ~8% of the total Indian Agriculture sector, and ~1.24% of India’s economy. Moreover, India is the 2nd largest producer of fish in the world, contributing to about 7.7% of global fish production, and ranks 4th in the world for global exports of fish and fish-related products.

India employs nearly 2.3Cr Inland fish farmers, with a balanced male (56%) to female (44%) ratio. These farmers have been plagued with a lack of transparency, an uneven supply of feed, and systemic logistical hurdles, in order to procure necessary feed for their fish farms.

Fish feed holds immense importance to farmers. It is a commodity that is a source of high operational expense for farmers. For a typical farmer, the cost of fish feed accounts for nearly 60-70% of the total input cost required to sustain small to large pisciculture operations.

Access and availability of fish feed, on a regular basis, are directly proportional to the growth and yield of fish production per unit of a hectare of land. Irregular and untimely access to feed often increases incidents of diseases increases mortality rate, and lowers fish production yield per unit hectare of land.

We believe that to tackle the above factors, EFeed has created a winning model entailing a digital-first direct-to-farmer feed procurement platform, enabling e-commerce, timely delivery of feed, and quality assurance of raw material for fish farmers.

Team Spotlight

The founding team at EFeed comes in with strong domain expertise, given their farming backgrounds, and strong on-ground execution ability given their previous startup experiences.

Kumar Ranjan, CEO: 3x Entrepreneur, with previous experience at a hyperlocal consumer delivery startup helping small businesses go online. Kumar focuses on business development, including sales management, and strategic partnerships.

Ravi Chauhan, COO: 2x Entrepreneur, with previous experience at RyCabz - an integrated car service and telematics platform. Ravi focuses on logistics and operations.

(Read more about E-feed)

That's all for today! A call out if you are a founder building in the AgriTech space, you can reach us at connect@huddle.work and we look forward to brainstorming with you. If you are an enabler and investor and would like a further look into our ecosystem, then we are happy to dive deep into these sectors alongside you.