Building India's Largest Fresh Daily Essentials Platform

Episode Description

In Episode 10 of Summit Series, Deepak Gaur (Partner, Elevation Capital) speaks to Chakradhar Gade (Co-founder, Country Delight) on the journey of building India’s largest fresh daily essentials brand.

Country Delight started in 2013 as a direct-to-customer dairy brand. While larger cooperatives such as Amul are solving for milk availability for everyone, Country Delight focuses on attributes such as freshness, quality, and minimal processing for the discerning consumer. Their secret sauce is a structurally better supply chain built on 2 main pillars; First, leveraging tech to build an app-based subscription platform making it hassle-free for consumers to order essentials daily to create predictability. Second, procuring directly from thousands of farmers to deliver products in <48 hours from produce to ensure quality & freshness.

Over time, Country Delight has expanded its value proposition to fresh products across multiple categories including bread, eggs, and fruits and vegetables, by leveraging its low-cost supply chain and app-based daily ordering platform. When we first met Chakri & Nitin in 2017, the company served 6K households. At the time of recording this episode, they bring subscription-based, fresh daily essentials such as milk, bread, fruits & vegetables to ~3 lakh households across 16 cities, having more than doubled in growth (by revenue) every year from 2019 until 2022.

Tune in to this episode to hear Chakradhar talk about his journey of bootstrapping the company for the first 5 years, and then entering a phase of hyper-growth having raised $150 Mn+ in the last 3 years. Chakradhar also covers aspects such as finding PMF in the early days, what building a brand has meant to him & why he is focused on retention across all aspects of his business including the team.

Episode Summary:

00:22 - Introduction to Country Delight

00:54 - Genesis of Country Delight and the support / skepticism in the initial days

04:32 - Thought process on remaining bootstrapped for first 4 years

07:16 - Finding product-market fit and building conviction on raising capital

10:44 - Leveraging customer insights for product development and differentiation

15:28 - Maintaining affordability as a core ethos

18:16 - Customer education, acquisition and brand-building

23:21 - Importance and role of technology at Country Delight

26:35 - Building the right team and maintaining low attrition

29:47 - Forward-looking plans for Country Delight

32:28 - Suggestions for founders in their early days