Founded in 2015, WayCool is an Agri-tech company driving social impact while transforming India’s food value chain. Waycool’s operations are spread across product sourcing, food processing, branding and marketing, last mile distribution, and farm inputs. This gives WayCool end to-end control over the food value chain.
It procures fresh agricultural produce from a network of farmers and leading Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) in India and seamlessly delivers it to 20,000+ customers such as Processors, Traders, Kirana Stores, HoReCa brands and discerning consumers. Infusing new-age technologies such as Robotics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) at each stage of the food value chain, Waycool is leveraging these technologies to scale and operate the food platform from soil to sale.
WayCool has a multi-channel product range such as fresh produce, staples, and dairy, serving clients in the general trade, modern trade, and food services space. Company’s consumer brands include – Madhuram, Kitchenji, L’exotique, Kwick Kitchen, DeziFresh and Fresheys.
The food supply chain in India has traditionally been inelastic and “supply led”. The gap between market demand and farmer’s production is getting wider, leading to low responsiveness of customers, extreme price fluctuations, higher produce wastage and monetary loss for both producers and aggregators.
Its core strategy is to eliminate these inefficiencies and transform the food supply chain into a “data-driven demand led supply chain”. In simple terms this means farmers produce only what is required by the market, based on the demand predicted by data tools and aggregated. This leads to higher responsiveness among customers and minimizes wastage. Waycool is ensuring this by engaging directly and deeply with stakeholders along the supply chain, from the farmer till the last mile retailer enabled by technology.
Waycool has received GAWA’s support with a EUR 13 M equity investment from the Huruma Fund, and currently with the implementation of a Technical Assistance project.
The Technical Assistance project “Cluster Development Program” (CDP) supports smallholder farmers in accessing inclusive values chains and sustainable agricultural knowledge. With this project, Waycool will enable the farming community to overcome cultivation challenges by influencing behavioral change and building capacity by providing access to information, know-how and resources, coupled with technology and advisory support system.
The CDP is one such capacity building approach under “Best practice adoption” that aims to handhold farmers to produce and supply sustainably and work with Waycool in the long-term ambition of supplying high quality, traceable and safe produce to end consumers, with minimal environmental impact. Since some of the recommended climate positive farming practices like regenerative agriculture, agroforestry and water harvesting are new techniques, the CDP program aims to handhold the farmers more closely in making this shift successful and create measurable impact not just on their soil and water resources (environment) but also on their net income, yield and cost of cultivation.
This story was submitted by GAWA Capital and was edited for alignment with the Missing Middle campaign.