Gobbling Down The Meaty Pie

We have a great ‘meating’ of the minds. In fact our knack to ‘pick bones’ with chicken, mutton, fish etc., at dinner table almost every alternate day isn’t a myth. To be precise 71 per cent of our believably vegetarian motherland loves to put flesh on their palettes, chopping out quality and hygiene without a second thought.

- Sandeep Soni

That’s what has been rotting away the market’s true potential. Now, the task at hand for online meat ordering start-ups is to drive the mindset change required on consumers’ part. Let’s look at the problem at both, the consumer and supplier/seller end. In the unorganized set up of the industry, dominated by local market mom-and-pop butcher shops and traders, quality is never an issue. That’s because they are not aware of prescribed government guidelines, right from what kind of feed is to be given to birds and animals to the right temperature settings for stocking meat before portioning it at the shop. On the consumer end too, things aren’t very different and that’s again because they are not aware of what kind of meat is fit for consumption. So they are not averse to buying whatever is slaughtered in front of them as fresh. All this is apart from the poor hygiene level at the shops that stinks perpetually.

“The first thing that hits you while stepping in a meat shop is the foul smell which itself is an indication of the quality of meat stocked,” says Siddhant Wangdi, Founder and CEO, Meatigo – a Gurugram based start-up that started last year. The way meat is portioned at shops is just one of the points on the quality checklist. Deepanshu Manchanda, ex-MobiKwik executive, who launched Zappfresh – a fresh chilled meat brand based out of Gurugram opines that 70 per cent of the quality aspects depend on the level of hygiene maintained while slaughtering the animals or birds and the rest on maintaining the right temperature while stocking the meat. “Who is slaughtering it and where, these aspects are also important. Further, how the bird or animal has been raised and in what conditions at the farm, whether clean water is used for slaughtering, etc., are critical areas.”