Establishing a credible proposition for profitability of farm produce has been a critical need for India to enable a sustainable agricultural set up. Getting farmers and agricultural producers a fair price for their produce has been the holy grail of governments, social entrepreneurship ventures alongside agritech ventures.
In a daring futuristic attempt to steer farming to a profitable direction, CityMandi, an innovative Bangalore based B2B food tech company dealing in wholesale online provision of groceries, has geared up to meet the challenge using blockchain track and trace coupled with a rich AI enabled ERP. It is restructuring this complicated mesh of supplies from the farms to the point of consumption with complete traceability. In 3 years of operations the company has already gathered a huge traction in Bangalore especially in HoReCa (Hotels Restaurants and Caterers) segment, by supplying high-quality and cost-effective raw materials to large-scale kitchens and is now planning to setup its sales and delivery units in Pune, Hyderabad and Mumbai in the next phase. Founders of CityMandispent a long time in understanding the fundamentals of our existing mandi (APMC – Agriculture Produce Marketing Committee) system, studied why their efficiency and shortcoming and saw a great opportunity to bring wholesale mandi in the heart of city utilizing cutting edge technologyto enable direct procurement from farm.They have served more than 1000B2B customers with over 500 deeply sourced SKUs (dry grocery and vegetables and fruits) direct from farm pan India. Citymandi is headquartered in Bangalore. With three years of matured operation, Citymandi is fast becoming a trusted name in B2B Wholesale grocery e-commerce looking to grow to a unicorn in this space thereby empowering hundreds of thousands of farmers in the process.
Unlike the retail purchase where it happens directly from a grocery supermarket or an online grocery store, the story is completely different in case of restaurants and large kitchens. The reason being very simple, that the restaurants will consume of lot of raw materials and hence a different setup is required for them, so that they can regularly procure raw materials in large quantities at the wholesale mandi price and ensure good service and availability of their recipe with a steady supply. In fulfilling this need, CityMandi is embarking on an ambitious plan to procure relevant raw materials as close to farm as possible. In several cases, the firm is working directly with farmers to enable them a steady stream of demand and a market level pricing to help them realize profitability on the produce. This is further coupled with the right technology combination of distributed infrastructure, a scalable digital payments and transactions platform, combined with the power of analytics to deal with the inconsistencies and inefficiencies in this market. A secure assurance in the path from source farmer to destination is also being ensured via a blockchain based solution.
Citymandi is showing promise to deliver on the longstanding need for farm sector to enhance agricultural income in a steady and reliable manner via first creation of an assured market in HoReCa sector, and establishing a reliable farm to fork channel. The founders Niraj Srivastava, and Dr Srinivas Padmanabhuni, coming from IIT background have always had in them to bring a technology enabled transformation in farm to fork supply chain. Both founders have post graduate degrees with extensive IT industry experience and are serial entrepreneurs. CityMandi is on the path to be a unicorn in the space powered with a mission to empower the farmers of India. For details you can contact [email protected] or check out http://www.citymandi.com
