Challenge
The aquaculture industry in India is worth $18 billion USD and over 16 million people in India are dependent on the sector. While exporters follow basic checks for quality, grades, and supply chain transparency, domestic retailers and distributors have no visibility on product quality and incur massive post-harvest losses and product deterioration due to poor handling, packaging, and malpractices.
The challenges faced by domestic retailers has resulted in poor price discovery and minimal quality assurance (of both produce and handling practices), leading to lack of trust in the value chain. This results in unreliable transactions, with product rejections, credit recovery risks, and multiple intermediations being required. It also heavily commoditizes the sector, providing no incentive to farmers to adopt better production practices, or to suppliers to ensure safe handling of produce. This results in 25-40% post-harvest losses and endangers consumer health.
Solution
FreshR is a business-to-business (B2B) supplier of fresh fish and meat products, managing farm-gate logistics, storage, and distribution in East India. FreshR aims to decrease post-harvest losses to less than 3%, ensuring consumer safety, and de-commoditizing farm produce. The company is building a digital marketplace for aquaculture produce that aggregates all the industry stakeholders (farmers, bulk buyers, traders, distributors) and maximizes the existing capacity of the sector, while solving for price discovery and quality assurance. The company leverages an Internet of Things-enabled, solar powered, Live Fish Value Chain Management Technology (LFVCMT) to create a zero-water-discharge model. LFVCMT is a set of products and processes designed to source, transport, store and distribute live freshwater fish in underserved communities for consumption.
Recent News
This Couple Is Taking Fresh, Hygienic Meat to Consumers (My City Links)
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