Start-up sets up India’s largest biomass cook-stove factory in Gujarat

Taking an unconventional route to manufacture cleaner and smarter stoves for nearly 15 crore Indian households below the poverty line (BPL), two MBA graduates have set up the country’s largest biomass cook-stove factory at Vadodara in Gujarat.

Greenway Grameen Infra, an incubatee company of the IIM-Ahmedabad’s technology business incubator, the Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), evolved as a profitable product design and distribution start-up. It aims to serve rural India through quality-of-life-enhancing home appliances and has already sold over 2,50,000 cook stoves, the company’s founders announced on Thursday.

With a capacity to manufacture 8 lakh units per annum, their aim is to replace the usage of traditional mud stoves (chulhas), that adversely affect health and environment and achieve greater scale.

“Our flagship product, the Greenway Smart Stove, is a high-efficiency cook stove that burns all biomass fuels (wood, cow-dung, etc.) while reducing smoke by 70 per cent, fuel use by 65 per cent and GHG emissions by 1.5 tonnes per annum. The USP of these stoves is that they are durable, without moving parts, and are portable,” said Neha Juneja, co-founder, Greenway.

“We are already India’s largest biomass cook-stove company. Currently we market two stoves of different sizes priced at Rs 1,399 and Rs 2,499 apiece, respectively. By March 2015 we would be selling nearly 40,000 stoves a month,” Neha said, adding the company has been profitable from Day One. “We broke even soon after we started”, she told BusinessLine.

The idea of Greenway Cook Stoves was born when Ankit Mathur and Neha Juneja, fresh MBA graduates from the IIM-Ahmadabad and FMS Delhi, were travelling through rural areas to undertake energy projects.

“Till recently we used to get these cook stoves manufactured by a local vendor. The Government’s commitment to ‘Make in India’ and renewable sources of energy, was a key decision-making criterion for us to initiate our own plant for manufacturing these,” said Neha. The stoves are also certified by the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy Resources.

Greenway was one of the two Indian companies to have won the Ashden Clean Energy for Women and Girls Award at the International Ashden Awards 2014. “With this new manufacturing capacity, we would be able to achieve economies of scale, produce more efficiently and hope to be able to pass on the benefits to end customers through lower prices,” she added.

Greenway received its seed funding from CIIE. “While we are headquartered in Mumbai and most of our customers are in the southern states, we felt that Gujarat offered a conducive environment for new businesses”, added Ankit Mathur, co-founder.

A for-profit product design and distribution company founded in early 2011, Greenway Grameen Infra aims to be the brand of choice in home energy appliances, they added.

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