A crisp venture
Green Tokri Farms grows salad leaves and herbs and delivers them fresh right to the customers? doorsteps
Starting an IT company, building it up and selling it off was much easier in comparison to running a farm in India, says Dr Marc Cremer, an IT entrepreneur-turned-agriculture entrepreneur. It has meant more hard work and enormous resources for Cremer, director of Green Tokri Farms near Pune, to keep his high-tech salad farm going while the returns are nowhere near what his IT company gave him. But the Indo-German Cremer, who was born in India and has lived in Pune for the past 16 years, continues to be passionate about his farming venture and says he is here to stay.
A agriculture engineering and economics doctorate from Berlin?s Humboldt University, Cremer started the Green Tokri Farms in 2001 along with his wife Benedikte and in partnership with two others?Zaheer J Vakil and Mohiuddin Mulla. Green Tokri is the brand created to vend produce grown on their 110-acre farm at Saswad, 30 km from Pune, to the doorsteps of customers around Pune and some select markets in Mumbai.
One of the foremost decisions that Cremer took was to not involve middlemen in his business and build a business model around direct delivery to the customer’s doorstep. So the technologist Cremer focuses on the back end, while Benedikte takes care of the customer end and ensures deliveries are made on time. Cremer says they have a customer base of 5,000 to whom their produce is delivered. High quality and affordable healthy leafy salads are not easily available and the farm produces these round the year, which is Green Tokri’s USP.
Five lettuce varieties are grown on the farm round the year?the iceberg, Romana, the red and green Oak Leaf and the butterhead lettuce. The farm also grows herbs such as basil, parsley, chives and garlic chives, sage, thyme, oregano and rucola. It later added a range of exotic vegetables to the tokri (basket) as customers started demanding more. Exotic vegetables such as celery, zucchini, cherry tomatoes, six varieties of coloured capsicum, broccoli, leek, fennel, baby spinach, red cabbage, French beans, eat-all-peas and Swiss chard are also grown. The farm also sells fruits such as apples, mangoes, avocados and strawberries.
The farm produce is grown in controlled conditions with a green house, drip irrigation, micro controllers, as well as an IT back end to handle the front end. The farm uses about 80% organic fertilisers and inorganic chemicals are only used as an extreme measure to keep the salad leaves bug-free.
The harvest on the farm happens early in the day when the morning dew is still on the produce. The salads are loaded within an hour into the cold-storage van and taken to the distribution centre in Pune where they are washed, packaged and stored at below 8 degree Celsius. Using a cold storage van, the produce is then delivered to the customers. The farm has two vans and three motorcycles and scooters for delivery. These are water cooled vans and not cold storage vans. This way the leaves can be stored for four to seven days in the fridge. The prices start at R60 for a 500 gram packet of salad leaves, while herbs start at R20. For payments, they follow the cash-on-delivery model.
The farm sends out SMSs once a week to registered customers a day or two before deliveries to confirm orders. Customers just have to reply to the SMS with name and quantity. Deliveries, which are free, are done once a week. Customers can also pick up whatever they need from the delivery centres. Customers are even invited to the farm for tours, which include a meal of fresh salads and goody bags. There is a team of around 50 persons involved in the entire operations.
Happy to go it alone, Cremer says they had a bad experience of going to the large markets and dealing with wholesalers in the business. When they had excess production, they tried to sell in the main markets in Pune and Mumbai, but were shortchanged by the agents/wholesale merchants who paid much below the decided rates and also deducted a lot of money as charges. Cremer feels dealing with the big retails chains is also difficult as the systems keep changing and ?recovering payments is hell?.
So to deal with excess production, Green Tokri has got into food processing as well. It now makes delicacy foods such as sun dried tomatoes, sun dried tomato pesto, basil pesto, pickled jalapeno, pickled capsicum, pickled and sliced gherkins, strawberry jam, Belgian Samurai sauce, mayonnaise and six varieties of salad dressings. These products add value to the Green Tokri brand and are a hit with customers. They are also priced much lower than similar imported products available in the market. There are plans to set up a separate processing company to handle this side of the business, along with another partner, Dario Dezio, who has been in the restaurant business in Pune for many years.
The milky way
Pasteurised premium milk is supplied directly from the dairy to homes daily across Mumbai and Pune. Bangalore, Delhi and Ahmedabad are next on the list
Nearly 70% of the liquid milk consumed in India fails to meet the country?s safety standards, says the National Survey on Milk Adulteration 2011, conducted by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India. Taking note of it is Devendra Shah, owner of Bhagyalaxmi Dairy Farm in Manchar, Pune.
Shah has launched a first-of-its-kind ‘farm-to-home’ milk brand, Pride of Cows, that is delivered straight to the customer?s home. The milk is produced and processed without human intervention using sophisticated dairy technology and costs R70 a litre.
The 26-acre Bhagyalaxmi Dairy Farm has 3,500 cows and a 50-point mechanised rotary parlour for hygienically handling milk.
Shah said they decided not to involve any middlemen or distribution channel so that the milk is not poorly handled or tampered by others in the distribution chain. The milk is instantly pasteurised, chilled and packaged in pet bottles and delivered in insulated boxes. The company has set up a customer support team and account managers who handle orders, after which the milk is delivered throughout Mumbai and Pune on two-wheelers.
By the end of the year, Shah plans to launch the brand in Bangalore, Ahmedabad and Delhi too. As of now 5,000 litres of milk is being supplied to south Mumbai alone and by end of the year Shah expects to be distributing 45,000 litres milk every day.
Special care is taken of the cows, and as farm manager Edmund Piper says, ?Happy cows gives better milk is a known fact.? So there is soothing piped-in music for the cows, besides a menu of alfalfa, green soya and bran, fans and cold water sprays to keep them cool, electronic health checkups and some more pampering with special sleeping mats.
Piper assures the milk is exceptionally clean with a low bacterial count, and can be had straight from the bottle and needs no boiling. The dairy farm is a part of the Parag Milk Foods Pvt Ltd Group that sells milk under the Parag brand and processed milk product such as ghee under the Gowardhan brand and Go cheese and yogurt. Shah forayed into Pride of Cows with an investment of R30 crore and says he is focused on the premium customer with this brand.