Raw Pressery to invest into healthy snacks and nutriments
Raw Pressery to invest into healthy snacks and nutriments

When did you decided to enter into the segment?

Health has grown from being a mere concern to a necessity. RAW Pressery stemmed out of a personal need of consuming an honestly healthy beverage on-the-go. The idea on gaining momentum, aimed to bridge the need for a juice that balances nutrition and flavour. In summer 2013, we took up the challenge to make getting healthy easier for people. Addressing the need to create something that mothers would feel happy giving to their kids, we thought that juicing would be the easiest alternative to get kids to consume their fruits and vegetables. Expert teams of nutritionists, medical experts and sensory analysts were brought in to create the recipes for benefits and of course, taste. Voila, Raw Pressery was born.

What was the learning factor?

We always believed that we had a great product. However, scaling up to new geographies and channels was challenging. Lack of a reliable cold chain, poor infrastructure at retail checked the growth of the brand. We are learning everyday and adopting practices which have never been the norm in the industry – air freighting across the country to ensure freshness and customer experience, commitment to replace stocks ahead of the expiry date and delivering direct-to-home orders with Dabbawala network.

As you have raised funding from multiple investors recently. Where can we see them going?

We received our funding from our investors- Sequoia India, Saama Capital and DSGCP. With this fund-raise, we aim to make our fresh beverages more accessible, available and affordable. The funds raised will be utilized to build a state of the art Pressery at Panvel, thereby expanding production capacity. This will help us add 8 more juices and smoothies ranging from Rs 50 to Rs150 to cater to our young and health-conscious audience. We are also increasing our team strength across different geographies to manage market presence and penetration. Our distribution footprint will scale rapidly to 12 cities and cover modern trade, institutions, HORECA and direct-to-home channels.

What is your expansion plan?

Since its inception, Raw Pressery has grown from strength to strength, expanding business to achieve its goal to be India’s largest clean label Food &Beverage Company. Registering revenues of INR 3.5 Crores in FY14-15, we plan to mature revenues up to INR 7 Crores in FY15-16 and 35 Crores in FY16-17.  We also plan to invest into healthy snacks and nutriments. We are the only company in Asia employing advanced cold pressurization with High Pressure Processing to maintain shelf life, producing about 8000 units of juice a day. With the coming in of the new state of the art production facility in Panvel, we expect to enhance production capacity by 2.5 xs. This would enable us to scale up distribution, increasing the foot print to 12 cities, reaching the consumer at 1500 points of sale by the end of FY16 covering modern trade, institutions, HORECA and direct-to-home channels.

What is the distribution network and presence?

RAW Pressery is backed by its superior logistics network and is the only cold pressed juice company to be present across the 7 leading cities in India. We deliver juices to households across Mumbai, Pune, Delhi and Gurgaon, every morning, every day.  And, soon plan to expand to Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Chandigarh and Goa. We are currently available at over 500 points-of -sale across Modern Trade, General Trade and institutions.

Are you also selling online. Tell us about your retail presence?

Yes, we are available online on our website for direct to home deliveries to Mumbai, Pune, Delhi & Gurgaon. In retail, we are the only cold pressed juice brand to be available across 7 cities panning across Mumbai, Pune, Delhi, Bengaluru, Gurgaon, Hyderabad and Chennai. RAW Pressery retails at premium retailers like Foodhall, Godrej Nature’s Basket, Reliance Retail, Aditya Birla Retail, Hypercity, MaxHyper and a host of other brands, hotels like Marriot and Hyatt, to online stores like Bigbasket, Zomato, Holachef, Grofers, and Zopnow.

How about taking a franchise route as this product is growing tremendously?

Franchising though an interesting option for a rapidly growing product, wouldn’t apply as universally to a product like Raw. Being a locally sourced cold-pressed beverage produced in-house, we focus a lot more on quality and maintaining standards of safety and hygiene. Typically, owned & controlled operations allow one to aggregate efforts to maintaining freshness and taste above all, which isn’t the case with franchising. Our passion for quality, freshness and taste, wouldn’t let us take up franchising.

 
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