What comes to your mind when you buy meat? Freshness, Hygiene, Healthy meat are a few of the concerns that arise in the mind while buying. Will you prefer purchasing meat from a roadside vendor or a butcher shop, or a retailer?
Many functions take place while preserving/processing the meat. Retailers make sure that the meat is fresh, cleaned thoroughly, preserved correctly, and packaged well. The best is served to the clients. After the pandemic, it is more important to take care of the food you are eating and where you are buying it. Meat is one of the most important food types that is treasured in India.
In many regions of India, meat is the staple food. Fipola is one retailing company that provides several options to buy meat in different regions. It ensures quality and hygiene and is one of the best in the retail meat market. Fipola deals with all kinds of products related to Meat, Seafood, Gravies, Sauces, Cold Cuts, Masala, and all accessory products that make it a Meat Super Store.
Fipola Retail India, an omnichannel meat D2C (Direct to consumer) meat and seafood retail business centred is in South India. Fipola’s objective has always been to redefine meat retailing in the country by providing quality goods and best-in-class customer service in a clean and pleasant shopping environment.
The Visionary Genesis
Fipola’s inception story started in 2016, when Sushil Kanugolu, Founder and CEO of Fipola, after his business study in Manchester, United Kingdom, returned to India with his experience working in meat retail from the UK. He took over his 37-year-old family business of seafood exports and gave it a modern form, and successfully turned it into a roaring affair. With this confidence, he started Fipola Retail India, south India’s first modern meat retail company in Chennai.
After the inception of Fipola Retail India, several other players also entered into rendering similar kinds of service to customers. Many failed, and some are still struggling to prove a point. But like Sushil, today India believes that meat retail has to take this modern step, and from millions of unorganized meat retails, the organized ones will stand out and thrive in the future. The business was always bootstrapped for the initial four years. But, now, as the company has leaped several folds, funding has been necessary to first spread across South India and then progressively in the entire country.
Overcoming Obstacles
Every business had faced its rise and falls during COVID-19. Organizing resources to work for procuring raw materials to sell has always been a challenge during the fearsome pandemic. But Fipola stood out from all others and proved a point by selling essential goods that were necessary for its customers during the lockdown. In fact, it started doing better than normal times. The pandemic has become an opportunity rather than a reason to slow down. Fipola has its own unique ways to retain its customers or even increase them organically. The no-tolerance policy for customer complaints help its customer contact teams realize that the customer is the most important part of the puzzle. “We replace or refund our goods to every challenge faced by the customer during their purchase journey,” says Sushil.
Leading to a Bright Future
Fipola has already started seeing the great fruits of its journey. In the last year, it also diversified into three more companies like Mediumrare, Grill House, and SourceFresh. It also started expanding its stores to other cities like Coimbatore, Hyderabad, Vellore Puducherry, Tirupur; and in future to Bengaluru.
Advice from the Best
During these hardest times that the human race has ever faced since its evolution, today, surviving is the biggest challenge for anyone. After emerging victorious over other business players, Sushil Kanugolu wants to give a tip to the world, “Do not waste time waiting for the good times to come back or do not stay back with living in your glorious past, spring up immediately with time and environment and bounce back. Think of an idea that can survive in the circumstances and work towards it. It may be entirely different from what you have been doing. But it does not matter. Bouncing back and surviving is the most important thing here.”
“I suggest the safest bit is to cling to a business involving essential commodities, which can never let you down. There is even no competition for n-number of players thronging up on any essential goods business, as it is the only thing that human race will strive for in times like these,” says Sushil.
