They will give you a chicken with three legs

Chennai: During a business trip to Paris, Chennai entrepreneur Nishanth Chandran had a sudden craving for Indian food. "I missed eating our spicy Indian food and went on a cooking spree and that’s how I came across a meat store, which to my pleasant surprise, was so hygienic and well-organised," he says. When he returned to Chennai and realised how different desi wet markets are, he had his eureka moment. That’s how B2C startup TenderCuts was born. It’s motto: to make the meat shopping experience easy and hygienic.

Born in a middle-class household, Chandran is a college dropout who launched multiple tech-enabled businesses, including a B2B payments business in 2005. Eight years later he sold the company to a French buyer and started his second innings in 2016 with omni-channel meat and seafood brand TenderCuts.

With self-funding of Rs 3 crore and no collateral to pledge, Chandran was determined to disrupt the Rs 2.5 lakh crore meat and seafood industry. Within six years of launch, his company touched Rs 250 crore in revenue last year, with 70% of the business coming from online orders. With five million app downloads, the startup recorded a 60% YoY growth and touched 10 lakh customer base in 2021. It sources supplies from about 1,000 farmers and fishermen, all from local farms in a 100-200 km radius of the stores.

With TenderCuts, Chandran aimed to fill gaps left unattended by local meat vendors - from reducing the long waiting queues at dirty shops to not getting specific meat cuts. "You don’t get three chicken legs, for instance, and have to buy the whole chicken. This made me think, one can either sell painkillers or vitamins," he says.

The Indian meat market is a `2.5 lakh crore segment. According to FSSAI norms, cut meat has to be sold between 0-4 degrees or frozen/chilled, whereas in the Indian wet market it is sold at room temperature. "We have bet on regulation to kick in, just like demonetization that led to regulation of the payment business," says Chandran. Launching its first store on OMR, TenderCuts clocked business worth `40 lakh within four months. The omni-channel model saw a 100-300% jump in revenue from Rs 20 crore to Rs 60 crore within 3-4 months of launch. "When the pandemic hit, our revenue grew by 300-400% with a sudden digital adoption," he says. "We saw Rs 10 crore-plus a year in FY18, grew to `50 crore a year in FY 2019, and Rs 100 crore in FY 2020. We will touch the Rs 300 crore a year mark this year and target annual revenue of `500 crore by FY22," he adds.

In 2021, TenderCuts raised Rs 110 crore ($15 million) in a round led by Paragon Partners, a mid-market PE fund founded by Siddharth Parekh and

Sumeet Nindrajog

with participation from NABVENTURES, a leading agri-food tech VC fund backed by NABARD. The NABARD partnership is particularly inclusive as it offers full or partial funding to farmers to buy and rear goats for a six-month period, along with a guaranteed buyback at fair market price. That focus on the community is something Chandran is proud of.

"Even our waste is put to use – the fat or meat and seafood waste is given to the Chennai Corporation as biogas feed," he says. As

TenderCuts grows

, it is looking to expand retail footprint from the current 55 locations to 80, opening shop in large markets such as New Delhi, Kolkata and Pune in 2022.


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