Poised to be driven as a post-harvest management facility, Fair N Fresh was the brainchild of Mr. Aasit J. Shah, the Principal Founder of the company. He is the father of Nilay A. Shah, a Designated Partner in the company who is providing best-in-class technology for the farmers to store their produce through Fair N Fresh. “Our traditional family business has been into Iron/Steel Trading, Imports and Supply along with furniture manufacturing; however, my dad had a desire to create a cutting-edge facility for the farmers to minimize their post-harvest losses,” says Nilay. Hence, Fair N Fresh was born.
In an interview with Insights Success, Nilay shares the dynamics of his company. Below are the highlights of the interview:
What is the USP of the company that serves as an advantage over competitors and benefits clients/customers?
Fair N Fresh means to the farming community is that we will keep your products fresh, and we will deal fairly with you, which is an anti-notion in India, we also wanted to signify that we have all storage solutions for you from there we derived our name, ‘Fair N Fresh Storage Solutions LLP’.
With that thought in mind we established, a 5000MT CA/MA Cold storage located at Shahapur, Maharashtra. The idea of Shahapur was clear that we are right in the middle of the fruit and vegetable bowl of India i.e., Nasik and Mumbai major consumption and export market of the country.
We have state of art Automatic Sorting Grading line for fruits as well mechanized line for root products. We also have ripening chambers, hot water treatment line, waxing line, packaging lines, pre-cooling chambers, CA Chambers, MA Chambers as well as Frozen Chambers. To have higher reliability we also set up our own weigh bridge as well as power back up needs within the premises.
As we stepped into this unknown business dynamics, we also wanted to add some products which globally were stored in cold storages but not in India. We then stumbled upon onion and garlic, which globally are stored in cold storage unlike in India where they are stored in traditional chawls. Now we are one of the very few facilities in India with proven capability to store onions and garlic.
Over the years we have grown our customer base along with product base, we are trying to provide best possible solutions to our customers to increase the shelf-life of their products. Our traditional customers are now storing multiple commodities with us mainly due to fantastic results for their products, be it spices, Apples in CA rooms, root products or delicate fruits. We have been able to achieve this mainly because of ability to have precision control of temperature, along with capability of individual chamber to uphold distinct storage atmosphere which is managed using SCADA facility for data management as well as mechanized handling systems to avoid thumping.
As ours is cold storage very dissimilar from traditional cold storages, the customers are able to see value of it in the long run and our customer retention over the years is almost at 95%.
What would be your recommendations to improve the coordination between farmers, the cold storage companies and distributors so that the produce is delivered to the end-customers in time?
The major hurdles we faced as a nascent company in the industry was to meet correct people who were willing to challenge the status quo of the industry and are ready to attempt storing different products at our storage. As a sector also the issue is the same, the temperament to embrace novel technology in a traditional agricultural culture of India.
As a nouveau entrepreneur in this sector I truly believe that as more people are exposed to the newer proven technology the better will be results to minimize post-harvest losses. The traditional system is causing losses up to 20-25% of the produce which amounts to approx. Rs 95,000 Crores a year, almost 0.67% of the total GDP on India, thus a change in mindset is required at the forefront. A simple example will be that most people believe that CA technology is only useful at place of harvest, which is completely incorrect.
However, at some point we understand the wariness of farmers to indulge with us at the start, for the same I truly believe that Govt. should step in to do a sample analysis with their resources, once a technology is proven publicise the same to common people for them to adapt. Other way around the same is that farmer producer organizations invest minimum quantities in such storages, and once the technology is proven encourage their community to adapt the same.
How did the pandemic affect the company? How do you plan to overcome the same?
The pandemic did affect our company, our notion of “Food Business always works” was shattered so to say. We had many contracts and agreements for storage which were cancelled on basis of Force Majeure. Our customers were uncertain about future demands and trends. The pattern of business also changed for few commodities during the lockdown because of Govt. measures to ensure social distancing. Our plan was simple that we will have taken this year on the chin and move on. We asked our bankers to assist us during this difficult year. We consolidated our resources to make sure that year 2021 we must add more clients more products and retain our old clients giving them the best service possible.
Brief us about the company’s future perspectives.
As a family we envisage to have more such storages in future. We are currently looking to get investors who buy with our vision to provide best in class post-harvest facilities to the farmers of the country, enable them to have best resources to cut their losses and compete on global stage to market their products.
We are also in talks with farmers to develop producer companies wherein we partner with them to export their premium material and ensure premium rates for their produce.
Once we have the setup of cold storages across the geography, then get into logistics to ensure actual farm to fork cycle with atmosphere control for the delicate farm produce.
