The major government initiatives are transforming the startup-ecosystem in India. Researchers state that the start-ups are every day moving on the upper line with the technology advancements. Besides, the Indian food sector is emerging as a high-growth and high-profit sector contributing to the world food trade. In this fragmented food industry, many tech-based and innovative food processing startups are playing a pivotal role in consolidating the front end.
One such innovative omni-channel food services distribution company is WayCool Foods And Products Pvt Ltd. The enterprise focuses on working with farmers and providing them with an increased annual income. It aims to offer its customers with one-stop-shop procurement solutions while running a hotel, restaurant or a catering company.
WayCool recently added few feathers to its hat, receiving recognition from the various popular media organizations as one amongst the ‘Top 7 Startup in the Agri-tech field’ and Top 50 Startup across the entire country.
Journey of WayCool with Its Dynamic Duo
Karthik Jayaraman is one of the Co-Founder at WayCool. Karthik has an experience of two decades across engineering, automatic, and management consulting. Being an alumnus of IIT Madras, Purdue University, and the Indian School of Business, he has great leadership capabilities and operational excellence. He majorly focuses on sourcing, processing, and enhancing the supply chain that has paved a way for the company to achieve milestones.
Sanjay Dasari is the other Co-Founder. He is a graduate in Entrepreneurship and Strategic Management from Babson College, Boston, with experience in consulting with the Boston Consulting Group. Sanjay handles strategic partnerships, marketing, digital innovations, distribution channels, and brand building for the company.
A Journey Transforming the Farm-to-Fork Supply Chain
After completing his undergraduate degree, Sanjay came up with an idea of setting a chain of restaurants in Chennai. Meeting with the multiple potential partners – chef consultants, interior designers, and even vendors from Koyumbedu Market in Chennai, he realized that the existing market setup was quite inefficient. While doing his further research on the industry, he met Karthik who was interested in pursuing a supply chain startup. They both understood the need for improvement across the supply chain and launched a company WayCool which efficiently transported and handled fresh products from farms to cities. The company works with around twenty-six thousand farmers across fifty-one different regions from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and is successfully transforming the farm-to-fork supply chain.
Providing Innovative Services is the Forte
WayCool operates with the vision to back an extensive network of farmers. It provides extremely fresh, hygienic, and ethically sourced food products to its customers. It has expanded its reach to the B2C and B2B customers through its SunnyBee Retail Chain. This wholly owned brand of the company sells fruits and vegetables through multiple distribution channels spanning small local shops, modern retail outlets, and HORECA.
Another offering of the company known as Origin Verified, is a brand that sources the food items directly from the farmers, produces and sells them exclusively in their SunnyBee outlets. These outlets include the tender coconuts, lychees, four types of rice, and other vegetables. WayCool delivers prominent services that can increase the farmer’s income and ROI.
Taking Client Satisfactions to a New Level
At WayCool, they pull through the story of why their services matter for the clients and how they can improve them. The company is heavily investing in automation to ensure that the manual jobs are easily performed which also assists to increase the job satisfaction security for the company. Under the leadership of Karthik and Sanjay, the company has nine different business lines operating within it that allow flexibility to custom build solutions to provide overall customer satisfaction. The company strives hard with an ideology to travel an extra mile and take the customer satisfaction to a new level.
Enticing Potential Clients with Comprehensive Strategies
When WayCool was launched in 2015, it was unable to buy the complete produce of a farmer and gives them the security that they were looking for. The company was striving hard to achieve a good scaling platform in the industry where the farmers wanted to tie up with large, established, and safer companies. It wanted to overcome the challenges of leakages of goods, avoidable moisture loss, and a different set of standard operations and handling practices.
With the growing tech-based industrial scale, WayCool started embracing every considerable opportunity and constantly worked on both physical and IT tools to enforce audit procedures for greater controls. It planned its tools by using the best-in-class analytics to reduced wastage and improves transportation efficiency between the cities. It focused on farmer security and started paving a way to transform the nature of the supply chain industry. It deeply understood the market complexities and followed a culture of frugal innovations and individual accountability. The company built a team of industry veterans with the expertise to drive the Indian Farm-to-Fork supply chain.
Today, WayCool sets itself apart with its unique business model. It has the ability to give farmers a single customer to deal with, and a guaranteed sale of their entire stock along with giving the end customer a single vendor to source from.
Future Paramount
WayCool is planning to build future solutions that would be more scalable, and yet, flexible enough to be adapted to each commodity and geography. It foresees its role of being an orchestrator of the supply chain and the game changer as well.
Sanjay says “We hope to leverage an extremely strong IT backbone to help, plan and forecast demand patterns and pass this information back to farmers for crop planning purposes”
