SUCCESS SPECIAL... How To Celebrate Small Wins To Achieve Big Goals

How To Celebrate Small Wins To Achieve Big Goals

We all want to be successful in our goals and it’s these goals that put meaning into our lives – give us something to strive for and help better ourselves. But have you ever tried to reach a big goal with giving up as the end? Have you started working towards your goal but over time felt that it’s just too high a mountain to climb – how are you ever going to reach the top? Have you ever experienced the feeling that you’ve spent so long trying to achieve your goal but felt you’ve got nowhere with it?

If this is you then you’re not alone. As humans, we are built to naturally see the problems and easily punish ourselves for bad behaviour. Poor performances are quickly condemned in our minds and guilt can rise to the surface. Our mindsets can bring us down when we feel we’ve failed and this usually results in giving up on dreams and goals.

So what is the secret to achieving these goals? Successful people make huge achievements all the time so how do they do it? What makes them so different?

Perspective and Mindset

Many people may put the success of others down to luck or a natural talent that allows them to excel at what they want to achieve. Yes, this can be the case but most of the time it is down to a particular mindset and way of looking at their goals as a whole.

Take Thomas Edison, the American businessman who invented the lightbulb. It took Edison almost 10,000 attempts to create a lightbulb – that’s a huge amount of ‘failures’ before finally finding success. But in response to his repeated failures he said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

In other words, he took his failures and turned them into successes because his perspective was focused on achieving rather than failing. It’s quite clear he had a mindset and positive perspective that allowed him to celebrate those small steps and see them as achievements.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s very easy for us to put ourselves down for small mistakes and failures. What about our small successes? Well the irony of this is that although we easily feel negative about failing, we almost never celebrate our successes either and this is where the magic lies.

Celebrate Small Wins

The key to success is realising that our big goals aren’t going to happen overnight, in the next week or maybe even the next year but this is okay. We tend to focus on the end goals rather than the small and significant steps we take to get us to that goal.

This is why it’s important to acknowledge and celebrate small wins. The problem with not doing this is we end up diminishing our motivation and motivation is what keeps us on the right path and gives us the strength to soldier on to the top of the mountain.

Demotivation usually comes because we are unsure of how far we are to our goals. We sometimes blindly believe that the goal is still so far away when it could actually be just around the corner – something we will never know if we give up.

It’s therefore important to make sure you celebrate your small goals along the way. Acknowledging these sparks the reward circuitry of our brains and releases chemicals that gives us the feeling of pride, giving us the feel-good and happiness factor and makes us want to go further towards our next achievement.

Appreciation is Key

Appreciation can sometimes be played down in life and we tend to forget to appreciate what we’ve done and what we have. Appreciating our small wins and the small steps we take can be the difference between failing and succeeding. Lack of appreciation and gratefulness can lead us down the slippery slope of not being able to see the importance of our small successes. Celebrating the small stuff is us acknowledging that we are well on our way to achievement – in fact we are achieving all the time and it’s a myth that we are only successful once we’ve reached that elusive goal.

Creating Successful Habits

Successful habits equal success. We all know creating and changing habits can be hard as our minds find it difficult to adapt to new routines but acknowledging and celebrating the small wins are how you help yourself establish the habits you need and to keep you going. Our brains need reinforcement so allowing yourself to be rewarded will develop an ‘addiction to progress’ that will cause your brain to want to carry on to the next steps.

Acknowledge the Importance of the Present Moment

So what is the secret to a successful habit? It’s all about understanding the importance of the present moment. We tend to take the present moment for granted – it seems insignificant and we believe the little things we do in the moment aren’t changing us.

You must invest in the small things over a long period of time and understand that you only have the moment you are in and although these moments seem insignificant when determining whether you succeed or fail at something, it is the combination of moments over time that achieve the big things.

For example, say you want to learn a whole new subject. Reading 10 pages of a book today on this new subject will not significantly raise your knowledge and maybe not even 10 pages tomorrow and 10 pages the next day. However, it’s the combination of all these moments of reading 10 pages a day that will eventually allow you to fully learn the new subject. In other words, reading those 10 pages a day may seem insignificant in the moment but they are all important in the steps towards achieving your goal.

5 Tips On Achieving Success

With all this in mind, it is the small steps we take that need to be acknowledged and appreciated for what they are. Motivation is a huge factor of whether or not we succeed and being able to reward ourselves and celebrate small wins is the key.

1. Break down large goals into smaller goals – You don’t want to focus on the bigger picture as tempting as that can be. Make sure you create small, achievable goals that will allow you to see your progress more clearly.

2. Reward yourself with achieving small goals – Think about what you enjoy the most and do this each time you complete a step. This cold be anything from treating yourself to your favourite coffee, chocolate or even a trip somewhere. Having something to look forward to trains the brain into creating motivation.

3. Don’t put pressure on yourself – Putting a deadline on your goals can lead to potential feelings of failure. Be relaxed with your time limits and this will increase your happiness and motivation.

4. Track your progress – Writing down or tracking your progress will remind you of how far you’ve come in achieving your goal. Sometimes we can give up because we are unaware of how close we are to success and forget how much we’ve done. Write down all the small wins – seeing them written down can even be a reward in itself!

5. Change your perspective – Sometimes when we focus too much on the end goal, it can seem too far away to get to. Try thinking of it, not as climbing a huge mountain, but descending one with perhaps a few nice restaurants (rewards) to stop off at and relax on the way down – this way you can visualise getting there a lot easier!

Jenny Marchal

https://www.lifehack.org/396379/how-celebrate-small-wins-achieve-big-goals

WORKPLACE SPECIAL...... Lighten the overload

 Lighten the overload

Does your brain have too many open tabs? Prevent yourself from getting overwhelmed at work by following these simple tips

Are never-ending to-do lists making you anxious? If you have moments of feeling overwhelmed by your workload, there are a few things you can try. Alice Boyes, the author of The Healthy Mind Toolkit and The Anxiety Toolkit, shares some insights:

Start with slow breaths

Slow breathing helps you stop panicking and take a more long-term focus as it activates the brain’s prepare-andplan mindset. Focus on breathing out like you’re blowing up a balloon slowly. Your breath will naturally regulate itself.

Practise your acceptance skills

The best self-talk helps you feel calmer and in control. It combines self-compassion and appropriate responsibility-taking. As a kickoff, you might try, “Even though I have many things to do, I can only focus on the one thing I’m doing right now. I’ll feel better if I do that” or “I would prefer to be able to get more done in a day, but I’m going to accept what I’m realistically able to do”.

Give yourself an accurate baseline

Evidence shows that people who say they work very long hours are generally overestimating. When you feel anxious about work, your brain will overestimate how much you’re working, which in turn makes you feel more anxious and sets up a selfperpetuating cycle.

When your perception of your workload is dramatically overblown, the situation feels hopeless. Try tracking your time for a single week. You won’t have to actively attempt to change your behaviour. The way you operate will naturally shift in positive directions due to monitoring.

Check your assumptions

We often self-generate rules we expect ourselves to follow. For example, “I need to reply to XYZ more quickly than he generally replies to me.” But it’s worth considering that whoever contacted you might not want an immediate response. Replying immediately to emails, especially afterhours, contributes to the always-on cycle for everyone.

Practice not responding to messages outside of business hours. Most people will get the message, and may appreciate you helping them with their own boundaries.

Know what success requires

You might also be self-generating faulty thoughts about what it takes to be successful in your field. Perfectionistic assumptions like, “To succeed I need to work harder than everyone else” become especially problematic when you’re rising through the ranks in a competitive industry and you’re in a group of other overachievers.

Look out for assumptions that cause unnecessary stress, especially if these also contribute to procrastination and paralysis. Write out your problem assumptions and a more realistic alternative.

Your realistic alternative thought could be something like “Given that my workgroup is composed of high achievers, there is a good chance that most of us in this group will be successful. Therefore, I don’t need to perform at the very top of the group to achieve success.”

Start taking time off now instead of waiting for the ‘right’ time

When you take an evening or weekend day off and the sky doesn’t fall in, you learn experientially that you can be less anxious about your workload. If you want to feel more relaxed about work, act more relaxed about it.

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

JAPAN / SAKE SPECIAL... Goodness, Sake!

Goodness, Sake!

Is the Japanese drink beer or wine? Does it even matter?

Sake’s lot is strange. As the world finally warms up to the centuries-old Japanese drink, sake’s home country, Japan, is trying to shake it off and move to glitzy beverages from the West.

“Sake” in Japanese could refer to any alcoholic drink, so you have to specifically say “nihonshu” to get the rice brew, which many there believe is the drink of the Shinto gods.

But is sake beer or wine?

Sake doesn’t fall into easy categories but if you go by the way it is brewed, it has closer affinities to beer. In wine, fruits are packed with sugar for the yeast to ferment them, but rice — which is fermented to make sake — cannot lure the sweet-toothed yeast cells. Sake follows the beer-brewing way where grains are processed to make sugar from starch. While the process of beer-making involves two steps — converting starch into sugar and sugar into alcohol — in sake the two changes happen simultaneously.

If the youth of Japan want to forsake sake, it is because they find it too traditional.

Sake is no modern drink. Its first hints are present in broken shards unearthed from the banks of the Yellow River that point to a prehistoric time, then its telltale presence can be found in the sacred texts of 3rd century BC that talk about drinking and the ritual dancing that followed it. Wet rice cultivation had already arrived in the country. The imperial court and temples held large tracts of land and the excess rice they cultivated could have gone straight to crude breweries.

By 12th century AD, the imperial monopoly of making sake was dissolved and common people began to try their hands at it at home. Soon sake became a way of life in Japan.

Sake is rice, water and koji, the yeast mould that feasts on rice. The better the ingredients the better the drink. It all starts with rice.

The otherwise inedible rice, saka mai (sake rice), is not what people cook at home for food. But this short-grained rice has a large enough kernel with starch content concentrated in the centre. Since sake uses only starch, the grains should also be brawny enough to go through some intense polishing, to remove the bran. The more it is polished, the clearer the sake will be. There are more than 80 types of sake rice that are bottled in Japan. Now twist your tongue around these names: yamadanishiki, miyamanishiki, gohyakumangoku and omachi. These are some of the most popular varieties.

Water is another ingredient that decides the quality of sake. Brewers look for sources — lakes, rivers and wells — that can make a difference to the taste. The koji mould, formed by kneading yeast and rice by hand or machine, breaks the starch in the grains to sugar and finally to alcohol. Multiple fermentation eases out the essence of rice. The resulting liquid may have more than 20% alcohol, which will then be diluted to 15% by adding water. Lees are removed, although there are people who like a bit of chewy stuff with the drink and some productions cater to their taste.

The drink benefits from a storage of nine to twelve months before it is ready to be bottled as sake.

In certain types of sake, a little alcohol is added to extract the flavours and aromas of the brew. However, toji, the sake brewer. will tell you how to keep such meddling to the minimum to make quality stuff. Toji, responsible for the final taste of the drink, is highly respected in the brewing industry.

Sakes range from the ordinary to the premium. The difference depends on the quality of ingredients, the degree to which the rice has been polished (the more the costlier) and the quantity of additives (the more the cheaper) in the final drink.

Traditionally, sake is drunk from a small ceramic or a wooden cup, but these days premium brands focus on glassware, which they think can make people appreciate the look of the cloudy white drink.

How do you drink it? On formal occasions, wait for your friend to catch your glass empty and let her fill it up. You can then return the courtesy by refilling her glass the moment it gets empty (if you are the host, pour the drink till it overflows, which shows you are generous).

Like wine, sake can be sweet or dry. It can be taken at room temperature or frozen. While hot sakes warm you up in winters, icy sake is good for summers. Take a whiff of it, and it will remind you of fruits, nuts and caramel. A good sake will taste mild and delicately balanced — a bit sweet, a tad bitter and acidic. Premium sakes are complex in their flavour and notes.

It is a misconception that sake goes well only with Japanese cuisine. It is wonderful with cheese and steak.

Sake is now gulped down outside Japan, with breweries popping up in China, North America, South America, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Australia.

And they are learning to say “kanpai!” Well, that is the Japanese way of saying cheers!

Manu Remakant

ETM19AUG18

MARKETING SPECIAL ....Zero-based productivity—Marketing: Measure, allocate, and invest marketing dollars more effectively

Zero-based productivity—Marketing: Measure, allocate, and invest marketing dollars more effectively

Taking a zero-based budgeting approach to enterprise-wide marketing costs can uncover new opportunities and spur more-informed spending decisions.

Marketing is critical to growth and consumer engagement, and its costs can account for more than 10 percent of revenues in many consumer-facing businesses. Yet few companies have fundamentally changed how they measure and assess marketing’s impact—often resulting in budgets and programs that are close cousins of years past. And few marketers are confident about identifying the real return on investment (ROI) of their marketing spending, or the impact of trade-offs.

This apparent paradox derives from a time when the bulk of the marketing budget was concentrated in above-the-line channels such as TV and radio, which are characterized by more limited measurability of outcomes than are typical of below-the-line activities such as search-engine marketing. And, since most companies build budgets based on the previous year’s spending levels, it has taken a long time for deep discussions of marketing ROI to reach the boardroom and become an executive-level priority.

In recent years, the proliferation of technologies that can process massive data sets, combined with the growth of digital advertising channels—which are inherently more measurable—has unlocked a massive opportunity to measure the performance of marketing investments. Even though analytical tools have become more widely available, our experience suggests that few companies apply the same level of scrutiny to overall spending in marketing categories. In fact, more than 60 percent of Fortune 1000 chief marketing officers claim that they cannot quantify the impact of marketing in both the short and long term.¹

To gain a more detailed view of marketing and sales expenditures, organizations must overcome several barriers. First, marketing budgets are often separate for each business unit and country, which limits visibility and comparisons. Second, the multitude of spending categories can make it difficult to identify the highest-value opportunities. Last, companies tend to use media agencies to manage, or at least intermediate, a significant share of their marketing spending—and agencies are often more interested in maintaining historical spending levels and allocations than challenging past assumptions to achieve savings. All of these challenges are underpinned by an entrenched, reactive mind-set when it comes to setting priorities and budgets.

These very obstacles, however, also make marketing and sales spending categories especially ripe for cost savings. Zero-based marketing—a comprehensive approach that extends zero-based budgeting principles to marketing categories across the enterprise—can uncover opportunities for savings worth 10 to 25 percent of spending in certain categories, and these funds can be reallocated to higher-value areas. In fact, with the rare exception of industries that are in a global state of decline, a well-executed reinvestment in high-ROI opportunities will deliver a greater return than “banking the savings” will. A recent McKinsey survey revealed businesses that are methodical about investing funds unlocked through zero-based budgeting and other programs into growth—either proven winners or future products and services—outperform the market. Notably, often more than 50 percent of these savings can be achieved in the first 12 months of a zero-based marketing effort, allowing for a very rapid reallocation.

Gaining a granular view of spending and opportunities

Zero-based marketing requires commercial leaders to pause and ask five critical questions.

1. Based on bottom-up analyses, what are realistic but ambitious targets for our company?

Companies need clarity about the fundamental drivers of their value creation, but often the drivers are not consistently understood or thoroughly applied when the strategy is developed. Business value is created by improving return on invested capital or top-line growth (for example, increased market share, positive market momentum, or a combination of both). Hence it is crucial to set targets that are consistent with the life stage of each area of the business in relation to consumer demand and preferences. These targets need to be defined through bottom-up analysis of revenue pools and growth drivers.

For example, the leadership team at a fast-moving consumer goods company could consider reallocating marketing dollars from products in its portfolio that have sizable market share in a low-growth category to products with the potential to gain share in high-growth categories. Although this action sounds intuitive, companies with cost-plus budgeting often don’t have a culture that enables conversations about such resource allocation.

Zero-based marketing establishes the lines of communication across business units and functions as well as the cadence for growth discussions. These efforts help to avoid underfunding areas with limited potential and instead free up resources to invest in high-ROI opportunities that might be overlooked or left with the crumbs after the demands of historically larger business areas have been satisfied.

2. How do we understand what is driving marketing costs?

The many marketing spending categories that exist are driven by different factors. To thoughtfully reduce, reallocate, or increase marketing spending across various categories, it is essential to establish a baseline where every dollar can be linked to a driver (or set of drivers) that determines why that money is being spent.

For instance, we can separate media spending into two categories: working and nonworking. The former is shaped by the reach, frequency, and quality of the advertisement the company deploys to communicate with customers; the latter is determined by the amount of creative, production, and research activity performed to create assets such as a TV ad, and it is not directly driven by how many customers will see or react to the asset. Therefore, the logic by which each of these media spending categories will be assessed is very different. In most cases, this approach would go one or two levels deeper to identify much more granular factors. For working media, examples are the number of customers acquired (or retained) during the ad airing period and the recall rate of the ad among target customers; for nonworking media, factors could be the reuse rate of existing ads and creative assets and the average production cost per asset, among others.

Establishing a common currency, where every dollar spent can be compared against others and decisions can be linked back to objective drivers, is fundamental to zero-based marketing.

3. How can the organization establish the right conversations to identify opportunities?

Marketing leaders have to work very closely with finance and other functions on resource allocation decisions. As mentioned before, marketing teams should set clear targets for growth and market share based on value-creation potential.

Then, rather than trying to understand the absolute spending on TV campaigns, for example, teams should compare saturation levels and gross rating points (GRPs) per message to find opportunities. Instead of oversaturating a target group, funds could be redirected to a campaign highlighting new products or brands. Similarly, in digital channels such as social media, data should be presented to quantify the impact on awareness, consideration, and conversion, not just presence or share of voice. In this way, the discussions become more structured and fact-based, allowing changes in direction to be clearly supported and communicated—while also aligning marketing spending more tightly with strategic priorities.

4. How can an organization reallocate funds among the different cost types to ensure it is maximizing ROI?

Commercial leaders very often have all the data they need to assess the relative productivity of various spending categories and their coherence with consumer needs and competitors’ positioning. Zero-based marketing compels managers to rely on factual information to achieve consensus. With data-driven insights, generic statements such as “We should spend more in digital” or “We should continue to invest most of our money in Brand A because it’s our power brand” either become more meaningful or are exposed as myths.

Companies can then make better spending decisions—for example, by allocating less to above-the-line campaigns and more to personalized communications through digital channels or customer-relationship-management (CRM) campaigns. In some situations, the ROI from a secondary in-store display might be greater than that of a price promotion. Such information provides commercial leaders with the tools to shift their spending.

5. What is the best way to track funds freed up in other areas to enable growth?

A zero-based approach establishes a consistent terminology for spending and investment, making ROI and budget discipline the common ground for decision making. At a global manufacturing company, for example, the CEO used the same cost-management tool that had been tracking budgets and spending for zero-based budgeting to plan, track, and monitor growth initiatives. The change resulted in more transparent budgeting decisions about which initiatives to finance and an ability to track and redirect resources during the course of the year to ensure optimal spending. The company achieved the target ROI.

More important than the tools and methodology used, however, is personal commitment on the part of marketing leaders. In all zero-based marketing efforts, commercial executives must provide marketing managers with full ownership of their respective cost areas, along with targets to achieve in the form of ROI, and where relevant, savings and reinvestment. Establishing a governance mechanism to track progress of these owners against their commitments is a fundamental step to ensuring that growth targets are met as a result of the adoption of zero-based marketing.

Impact of zero-based marketing

One EU-based consumer packaged-goods company launched a zero-based marketing program with the goal of redirecting funds from marketing and sales categories to support of new growth initiatives. The management team was skeptical of the cost savings it could achieve, since these categories had been scrutinized already.

As a first step, the team created a database of more than 50 spending categories across business units and regions. It then applied industry benchmarks to set targets for each category. Using this detailed information, the team identified cost-savings initiatives, including removing some components from the media agency contract reducing overall agency fees, and cutting packaging design costs. The zero-based approach created new budgets and a proactive cost-management process for each category.

The impact was significant: a 15 percent increase in spending efficiency, with more than 70 percent of the opportunities coming from nonworking media levers. More important, the process helped to instill an ownership mind-set among marketing and sales managers, enabling cost-reduction efforts to be sustained beyond the initial stages.

In another case, an online gaming operator was in a period of stagnating revenue growth while marketing costs—mostly for digital channels—were increasing year on year due to market inflation and increasing competition. With profitability coming under pressure, management was compelled to take a hard look at the cost of acquiring new customers in relation to their value. By mapping all of the marketing activities and their contribution to new customer acquisitions and then linking them to the behavior and economics of the customers acquired, executives were able to rank their spending categories in order of effectiveness.

They were stunned by the results: 15 percent of their marketing was destroying value by bringing in low-value customers at a negative ROI. In the space of three months, marketing leaders cut spending in those areas and used the savings to finance high-potential channels. One such channel was programmatic media buying, a methodology that allows the marketing function to precisely target specific customers using personalized messages and offers based on their behavior. With the savings, the function was also able to build a rich data set comprising third-party sources of data such as social media activity.

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It has never been easier for companies to reassess their level of marketing spending, where funds are allocated, and ROI by category. From greater access to data to media agencies with in-house capabilities to measure the performance of marketing activities, companies have a range of tools and support at their disposal. All that remains is for marketing executives to use those tools to embrace a more analytical, granular approach to spending decisions.

By Jeff Jacobs, Roberto Longo, Mita Sen, and Björn Timelin

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/zero-based-productivity-marketing-measure-allocate-and-invest-marketing-dollars-more-effectively?cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mck-oth-1808&hlkid=a58cad5139c743aba19ac0e0d77b075e&hctky=1627601&hdpid=b933575b-bbce-450b-a8aa-4d11c1abb79a

STARTUP SPECIAL... Prized Cut

 Prized Cut

Startups in big cities are betting on technology, fresh supplies and smart logistics to carve a chunk off the massive market for meat and fish

It is 8 am on Independence Day. Staffers at Gourmetdelight’s distribution and packaging centre at Mumbai’s Chembur start trickling in. It is going to be an easy day. All deliveries have been scheduled for later hours as most customers had “patriotic” engagements that morning. Some staffers, who start receiving and packing fresh mutton, chicken and vegetable supplies that are arriving from villages around 50 km away, would soon change roles — they would get on their motorcycles and deliver products across Mumbai. Founder and CEO of the online food store, Raka Chakrawarti, prefers to employ delivery boys instead of using a service like Swiggy. More than 70% of the orders are from repeat customers and it helps if the company, through its staff, can get to know its customers and their preferences.

A degree of familiarity is key in this business. Customers have a preference for cuts of chicken or mutton. They ask Chakrawarti for fish of a particular size, especially if it is hilsa. Chefs from top hotels, who know her from her earlier stint in hospitality at Taj, call Chakrawarti for supplies. Success in fresh products, she says, needs a similar intimacy with the supply chain also. Chakrawarti works closely with her suppliers — MD Shakeel sends meat from near Pune, Reena Shah brings in poultry from Nashik and Daniel Joseph, who owns a few fishing boats, supplies fish from Colaba. Chakrawarti likes to update her customers on details like when the next batch of fresh desi eggs would arrive from Nashik or about the catch of the day.

The nature of the business gives it a unique positioning, but also acts as a barrier to scaling up. While earning customer loyalty can guarantee business, widening the trade comes with logistical problems. Even within the same city, it is not possible to spread out too wide, if one wants to deliver fresh fish and meat. Kanwaljit Singh, managing partner of venture capital firm Fireside Ventures, and an early investor in online meat shop Licious in his personal capacity, says: “To build the business, you need a supply chain which is very local and a front-end logistics that is very tight. And you have to do it in every city.”

Yet, a bunch of fresh fish and meat start-ups in India have unsheathed their national ambitions after consolidating their home base. In the past three years, a large number of fresh fish and meat startups have set up shop in India, with each major city having at least two or three outfits. For each one, it has been a learning experience. ET Magazine spoke to five fresh meat and fish startups across the country that are harbouring national ambitions. Some, like Licious of Bengaluru, have already moved to their second and third cities.

These young entrepreneurs are turning fresh meats and fish business on its head. They couldn’t have chosen a better time. More families, especially younger people, now prefer to get deliveries at home rather than going to a butcher shop or fish market. Some, mostly those living away from their homes, are even unaware of how to buy fresh fish or meat. This in a country where 70% women and 78% men are non-vegetarians, as indicated by the National Family Health Survey, 2015-16. It also showed 42.8% of women surveyed and 48.9% of men surveyed consumed fish, chicken or meat weekly. Some surveys have also said a third of Indians are vegetarians, and only a fourth have never eaten fish or meat in their lives. The Union Ministry of Statistics’ National Sample Survey Office survey in 2011-12 showed only 36.88% of the people surveyed had not eaten non-vegetarian food in the last one month. The India Human Development Survey — conducted jointly by India’s National Council of Applied Economic Research and the University of Maryland, USA, in 2011-12 — showed only 23.48% of Indian households could say that everyone in that household has never eaten non-vegetarian food.

The growth potential is appetising. The market for Indian meat and poultry is pegged at $31 billion, according to industry estimates, and expected to grow at 20% CAGR to $65 billion by 2022. The fish and seafood market is pegged at $20 billion with an expected grow at 15% CAGR. Only 10% of this combined market is organised.

Yet there is a perception challenge. Licious cofounder Abhay Hanjura, who found time to talk to ET Magazine while vacationing in Vietnam last week, recounted how a waiter in a Hanoi restaurant was surprised when he ordered a frog dish. The waiter thought all Indians were vegetarians. This was not a new experience for Hanjura. He recalled how he and his cofounder Vivek Gupta saw the same reaction at Harvard Business School’s India Conference in February 2018. During a session on disruptive innovation for consumer brands, the largely American audience was surprised anyone could think of building a technology-based business on fresh meat out of India.

The Indian diet myth has to be busted, said Hanjura over the phone from Hanoi. “It is time meat stepped out of the closet in India.” After all, India is one of the largest consumers of meat, the largest exporter of beef and the largest holder of livestock in the world. “Finally, meat is making news for the right reasons,” he said, talking about the buzz around fresh meat and delivery startups.

For one, funding is available and venture capital and angel investments are happening. While Licious from Bengaluru, which is now a three city-operation, has raised around $15 million (₹100 crore plus), Delhi-NCR based Zappfresh has already raised ₹26 crore. Players like Gourmetdelight is in the market for funding. Chakrawarti, who has been bootstrapping her venture so far, is looking for an angel funding of around ₹10 crore. Kolkata-based Delybazar, having raised two bridge rounds (between seed capital and series A), is looking for a fresh round of $2 million (₹14 crore).

Technology investments in the fresh food business are usually done in checking the quality of the meat and fish. Licious, for instance, retains a sample from every batch. They also have the technology to track back every piece of meat or fish to its origin.

The business of delivering fresh meat is the exact opposite of what frozen meat and poultry companies do, says Abhirup Basak, cofounder and CEO of Delybazar. Frozen food players build infrastructure to preserve their perishable products for long. But the focus in this business is not to freeze the products, but to use a little cooling to preserve freshness and deliver as fast as possible. There are regional quirks too that the players must keep in mind while thinking about expansion. In Kolkata, Delybazar sells more fish than meat and poultry put together. In Delhi, Zappfresh says, chicken accounts for 55% of sales.

The biggest customers are those aged between 20 and 35, says Deepanshu Manchanda, who set up Zappfresh in 2015 along with a colleague from his Mobikwik days, Shruti Gochhwal. Manchanda, CEO of Zappfresh, says the younger generation is keen on nonvegetarian food but does not fancy visiting the butcher or a fish market. Neither do they have the knowledge to choose raw meat or fish based on its freshness and quality.

Keeping meat fresh is the key, says serial entrepreneur Nishant Chandran, who started Tender Cuts out of Chennai after selling his earlier venture E- Billing Solutions to Ogone Payment Services. “Meat starts losing moisture the moment it is cut into pieces.” He had to change his business model midway making the spokes in his hub-and-spoke model, more important. Now the bulk of the cutting is done at designated places closer to the customer to ensure the product is fresh. The spokes are also retail outlets, and retail sales account for 40% of the total.

Just like Chandran, many others have changed their model midway. Some have introduced pickles, spreads, ready-to-eat products and marinades. Delybazar has even gone the whole hog to add groceries. Basak says a Bengali household buying meat is usually also looking for onions and potatoes, for the typical Bengali chicken or mutton curry. Chandran says: “In this business, you cannot go too far from your source. You cannot scale up too much.” One way to get past this barrier is via acquisition. That is what Pune-based Easymeat did when it acquired rival Nonveggies, as it wasn’t able to cover the whole of Pune from its single warehouse.

Expansion is on the minds of others, too. Licious, which has 5,000 orders a day, has just expanded to Gurgaon and Hyderabad. Chandran wants to take Tendercuts, which has 1,500 orders a day, to Hyderabad. Even smaller players such as Gourmetdelights (100 orders a day) is raring to expand. Chakrawarti says she will move to cover Bengaluru, Gurgaon and Pune as soon as she gets funds. Basak wants to expand Delybazar, which has 400-500 orders a day, beyond greater Kolkata, start at Bhubaneshwar by the March 2019 and then possibly Hyderabad.

But is there enough on the plate for everyone? Yes, says Manchanda of Zappfresh. “Market size is not a problem.” The NCR market alone has ₹12,000 crore worth of annual sales of meat and fish, says the CEO of Zappfresh, which has 1,500 orders a day at a ballpark of ₹600 per order. He wants Zappfresh to move to another city by December 2018. The company has invested in technology to forecast demand. It is also working with some of the larger grocery players like BigBasket to supply fresh non-vegetarian offerings. Delybazar celebrated its birthday on August 15. It’s been three years since the first delivery. Unlike Gourmetdelights, the day was hectic at Delybazar. The five founders, all engineers from Jadavpur University, could not get together. So, they cut two cakes. One at the office and the other at a processing centre. Life has become busier, and meatier too.

suman.layak@timesgroup.com