Finger On The Pulse

Two-year-old Fingerlix sees an exciting opportunity in ready-to-eat fresh food

- Samar Srivastava

In the decade that Shree Bharambe, 47, spent as a market researcher, there was one trend he knew India’s housewives would wholeheartedly attest to. “While our lifestyles have changed, we are quite traditional when it comes to food. We still want our three freshly-cooked meals a day,” he says. Cooking had become one among many responsibilities and what came up recurrently was an urgent need to simplify the kitchen.

With ready-to-eat brands clogging supermarket shelves, Bharambe and his colleague Shripad Nadkarni, 57, realised that the opportunity lay in the market for fresh food— defined as anything with a shelf life of seven to 21 days. An initial plan to get into home delivery of fresh food was quickly shelved as preliminary research showed that with small order sizes, the economics of the business had a slim chance of working out.

Unlike packaged food, which stays on the shelf longer and doesn’t require refrigeration, fresh as a category is far more difficult to get right. Still, if they got the product right, were able to forecast demand accurately and cracked the distribution challenge, they reckoned the model is a highly scalable one. The only nagging question they had was whether India was ready for disruption in the fresh food space. Eager to find out, Bharambe, Nadkarni and another colleague from their market research agency MarketGate, Varun Khanna, decided to test what is a relatively virgin market. Bengaluru-based iD Fresh Food competes with Fingerlix in some product categories, but its selection is not as extensive.

TASTE OF INDIA