Getting Under The Shell Of It

By focusing on the US market, and exporting value-added shrimps directly to large retail clients, Devi Sea Foods has carved a lucrative niche for itself

- Pravin Palande

In the early 1990s, P Brahmanandam, who was a civil constructions contractor in Visakhapatnam, received an offer from a friend who owned fishing trawlers. Given the surplus cash he had from his business, would Brahmanandam be interested in investing in the lucrative marine export industry? He said he would.

After pooling in their own money, and taking a ₹25-lakh loan from Union Bank of India, the two friends started Devi Sea Foods (DSF) out of a leased facility in 1992, with the intention of buying shrimps from local farmers and selling them in the international market.

Brahmanandam, who joined the company as its managing director (and remains so), quickly realised how high the margins were, and DSF turned profitable in a few months. In 1997, he bought out the 50 percent share his friend—whom he declined to name—had, and took full control of the company.

By 1997, DSF had established itself in the Japanese market, with clients such as Mitsubishi Corporation and Hitachi Corporation, and was training its sights on the US market, one of the biggest markets for Indian shrimp exports. For this, he approached an old Australian client. In 1996, says Brahmanandam, this client, then a small-time shrimp importer, wanted to return a batch of DSF shrimps because they were substandard, and he had readily agreed. By the time Brahmanandam was thinking of entering the US market, the Australian client had turned into a major vendor for Orlando based Darden Restaurants, which owns eight restaurant chains in the US and Canada with 1,536 outlets and sales of $6.93 billion in 2016. He helped Brahmanandam get in touch with them. In 1999, DSF started supplying processed shrimps to Darden Restaurants.