Nandu’s Chicken to have 50 stores by March 2020

Omni-channel retailer of farm fresh chicken, Nandu’s Chicken plans to ramp up its offline network from 22 to 50 stores by March 2020.

The stores spanning 300–500 sq ft will be set up at ₹8 to 10 lakh per store and will offer home delivery up to a radius of 5-7 km, a top executive told BusinessLine.

Product range

The 22 stores that are spread across Bengaluru sell fresh meat, eggs and 25 ready-to-cook and ready-to-eat products that fall under quick bites, cold cuts and marinades including chicken pop corn, breaded chicken wings, chicken salami, chicken frankfurters, Guntur chilli chicken, among others.

Nandu’s Chicken is a venture of the ₹500 crore Nanda Group, one of the pioneers of the poultry farming industry which operates in Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra.

“We plan to open 28 new stores in Bengaluru by March 2020. After that, we will expand to another city. While our core focus will always remain on farm fresh, healthy meat with no steroids, no hormones and no antibiotics that are 100 per cent traceable, we also have a whole new range of 75 ready-to-eat and ready-to-cook products in the pipeline, like chimichurri chicken, peri peri wings, teriyaki chicken, Cajun chicken etc, that are targetted at millennials,” said Narendra K Pasuparthy, CEO, Nandu’s Chicken. The company does not use additives, colours, chemicals or taste enhancers for its ready-to-cook and ready-to-eat products.

Scientific process

“We are breeders of broiler parents for the last 50 years and own 15 breeding farms across South India. We produce 3.5 million chicks a month in our modern hatcheries that use IoT (Internet of Things) technology. We sell these chicks to our farmers who subscribe to chemical-free farming methods and grow them to adulthood after which, we buy them back, process and then retail it. The chicken feed comes from our three feed mills that produce 60,000 tonnes of feed a year. Unlike other fresh meat companies, we control the entire value chain,” said Pasuparthy.

The company entered the international market with Dubai in 2005 and plans to enter Oman in April.

Besides its own website, Nandu’s Chicken is available on BigBasket and Dunzo marketplace. The company processes 40,000 orders a month from online and walk-in customers at its stores and is growing at 25 per cent month-on-month. Forty per cent of its total sales comes from the online channel, of which 30 per cent is from its own website.

Market size

“Indians consume approximately 3,500 million chicken a year. The $40 billion chicken market in India is growing at 8-10 per cent a year. In Bengaluru alone, our addressable market opportunity for fresh chicken is approximately Rs ₹3,000 crore and ₹300 crore for our value-added products,” said Pasuparthy.

Licious, Zappfresh, Freshtohome, EasyMeat, Meatwale are some of the other players in the fresh meat space.