Supply Chain and Market Linkage

Clover Ventures: Bridging Income Gaps for Poor and Small Farmers

January 24, 2021

Clover Ventures is an Agri-tech start-up that works with about 60 small scale farmers spread across nearly 70+ acres in the vicinity of Bengaluru and Hyderabad. It works in partnership with the farmers and supplies high-quality, consistent and traceable fresh produce for internet kitchens, modern retail franchises, kirana stores and individual consumers in these cities.

Challenges:

Quality and year-long availability of crops are the primary challenges that the company looks to solve. Clover Ventures found that the state of the supply chain was fragmented and unorganized. It was complex and inefficient supply chain and showed the following issues:

· Perishables

· Under-productive

· Opaque to demand

· Low shelf life & Seasonality

· Void in stable backend supply

· Consistency & quality issues

· Lack of traceability & availability

· Spoilage due to multiple handling

· Overheads of managing multiple suppliers

Solution Provided by Clover Ventures:

Clover Ventures partners with small farm holders, and grades, packages, and sells their premium quality, greenhouse-grown fresh produce — lettuce, basil, spinach, coriander, zucchini, beans, cauliflower, etc. — through B2B and B2C channels. Farmers in Clover’s network typically hold one to two acres of farmland, where demand-led cultivation is done using its full-stack agronomy solutions, consumption prediction and traceability, and end-to-end farm management services.

Clover Ventures essentially organises the vast number of scattered greenhouse farmers in the country, drives standardisation across yields, improves productivity, reduces wastage of perishable produce, and ensures consistency for end consumers. Clover also picks up the produce from the greenhouses, transports it to its own warehouses (two in Bengaluru, one in Hyderabad), and delivers it to customers, which include cloud kitchens, fine dining outlets, modern retailers, and food processors.

Key Benefits:

-Production for demand and on demand

-Drive calibration across yields, productivity

-Shape web of farms for scale, technology empowered farm management

-Demand-backed supply chain for perishables which are attentive on quality, consistency, traceability and high level of certainty.

Clover’s business model revolves around demand-led cultivation, supervised farm network, and full-stack agronomy. The managed farm network of greenhouses is based in peri-urban and rural areas surrounding urban consumption zones, thereby ensuring freshness and reducing spoilage. Clover provides a full-stack agronomy solution to the greenhouse farmers in the network, improving yields and standardising output quality.

The company has seen farmers increase their yield anywhere from one-and-a-half to four times the yields that they were getting without the company’s intervention. The extra benefits include reduced wastage due to committed market access. Farmers’ incomes go up by 30 per cent to 50 percent.

Future Outlook:

By leveraging peri-urban greenhouses, Clover aims to deliver the highest quality vegetables and fruits to B2B and B2C consumers in India’s largest metro areas. It plans to use the capital to scale up its B2C operations, enter new metro markets, grow its farm network, and ramp up its team across divisions.

They are in the process of launching their farm to consumer brand of fresh produce and began its B2C journey in Bengaluru this year in April and the coming days will scale the B2C offering across both Bengaluru and Hyderabad.  

As the requirement for a clean, safe and hygienic source for F&V is becoming mainstream, Clover Ventures foresee an opportunity to grow more than 10X and are scaling up the supply chain, warehousing and farmer infra capabilities to meet this expectation.

For more information on the latest developments in the Agritech space visit our page focusagritech.com