How meat and seafood brand Licious made the most of the pandemic tailwinds and now has revenue of Rs1,000 crore in its sights by March 2021. Can it get there?
Abhay Hanjura (left) and Vivek Gupta, co-founders, Licious
The poultry business is not for the chicken-livered. Sometimes, the fears surrounding it are based on rumours, at other times they’re real. Like in January 2015 when Taiwan culled over 1.20 lakh chickens. The island nation, gripped by bird flu, was working on a war footing to contain the outbreak. By April, the fear had spread to India, when Telangana decided to slaughter 1.45 lakh birds.
Three months later, in Bengaluru, some 600 km from Telangana, Abhay Hanjura and Vivek Gupta were ready to go against the grain. They quit their jobs—Hanjura was with Futurisk Insurance Broking Company and Gupta with venture capital firm Helion—to start meat venture Licious.
By March 2020, it seemed as if the chickens had come home to roost. This time, though, the fear around the fowl was driven by fake news. A WhatsApp message, which linked the spread of the coronavirus to eating chicken, was taking a toll on the fourth biggest chicken producer of the world. “For anything terrible happening across the world, the first casualty is poor chicken,” laments Varun Sadana, chief operating officer and co-founder of Licious.
Towards the end of the month, India went under lockdown, and reports of a few food delivery riders turning corona positive in top cities started trending. Prospects of doom and gloom for the poultry industry and for Licious, which had laboured to clock Rs180 crore in revenue in fiscal 2020 looked real. Sadana feared the worst.
Fast forward to September. After almost six months of living with the virus, the fear has taken on a delicious avatar for Licious. With people gravitating towards a safer lifestyle, a more hygienic form of food consumption, and neighbourhood meat shops grappling with erratic supply, Licious made the most of the pandemic tailwind by clocking a staggering Rs600 crore in revenue, a jump of over 300 percent over the previous year’s topline in just the first half. In fact, the business done by the meat and seafood brand in six months was more than what it did in five years.
Chicken, interestingly, emerged as the highest selling category during the lockdown, followed by seafood and meat. While last June and July, Licious clocked 1.50 lakh orders a month, the numbers for the same period this year stood at a million (10 lakh) per month. “This tells you how much we grew,” says Gupta. The company, he adds, now plans to leapfrog to Rs1,000 crore in revenue by March 2021.