From hatchery to omnichannel: How Nandu’s is rewiring India’s meat retail

Bengaluru: Meat is a deeply “passionate purchase” in India. Ensuring consumers derive the most wholesome experience when they select high-quality chicken, mutton or seafood for a weekend feast has been an evolving journey for Nandu’s Foods.

The brand traces its roots to 1989, when PS Nanda Kumar launched a processed foods venture retailing nuggets and burger patties, among others. Known affectionately as “Nandu” in the poultry industry, he ran the business for three years before returning to his poultry operations. In 2005, his son, Narendra Pasuparthy, a software engineer in the US, returned to India, and was involved in some ventures and also oversaw the family’s poultry business in Dubai, before formally establishing Nandu’s Foods in its current avatar in 2016.

Today, Nandu’s Foods — part of the Nanda Group — has evolved into an omnichannel meat brand built on integrated farming. Its proposition: natural, hormone-free and antibiotic-free chicken, alongside seafood and mutton products.

“People assume that because a chick grows to 1-1.5 kg quickly, it is injected with hormones and steroids. That is untrue. Birds grow fast naturally,” says Pasuparthy.

The parent group operates as a broiler-breeding company. It sources parent birds, cross-breeds them, incubates the eggs in its hatcheries and produces around six million chicks a month. Five million are sold to independent farmers, while one million are grown under Nandu's Foods' integrated farming model.

“In integrated farming, the farmer brings labour and infrastructure. We provide the chicks, feed, veterinary care and tech-enabled monitoring systems. The investment is ours,” Pasuparthy tells DH.

The company works with over 600 integrated farmers across South and East India. Once the birds reach 2-2.1 kg, they are routed through Nandu’s retail channels for sale to consumers directly.

Supporting this ecosystem are three strategically-located feed mills producing 80,000 tonnes of natural feed annually — a corn-and-soya blend enriched with essential vitamins and minerals. The group operates across eight states — Assam, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka and Maharashtra — with 20 breeding farms and hatcheries. Farms are selected after stringent checks on infrastructure, biosecurity and farmer integrity.

The poultry journey began decades earlier. In the 1960s, Nanda Kumar started as a layer farmer with 500 birds in Banashankari, in Bengaluru, supplying eggs to hotels. At a time when backyard poultry dominated, he and some peers helped pioneer scientific poultry breeding and processing in India.

“Layer birds lay eggs for consumption and breeding. Today, a larger part of our business is breeding broilers. These chicks are bred for weight gain and lack reproductive ability. We house parent birds for 1-1.5 years before sending them to market. The process is scientific. The hens may be hybridised, but not genetically-modified,” Pasuparthy says.

After years of selling chicks to farmers and birds to traders, the company moved downstream in 2016 with its own meat retailing business, under the brand — Nandu's Foods.

The Indian meat market is estimated at over $55 billion, of which poultry contributes about $35 billion. Yet most of it remains unorganised, dominated by neighbourhood butcher shops.

“Back in 2016, only 12-13 per cent of consumers buying offline were comfortable purchasing from chilled chicken stores,” he says. “We grow birds far from cities, move them directly to processing plants while maintaining cold chain, and ensure hygienic handling throughout.”

The company operates one processing plant in Bengaluru. Today, Nandu’s runs over 50 company-owned stores, largely in Bengaluru with some presence in Hyderabad, and serves more than 35 cities through quick commerce partnerships. About 50 per cent of revenue comes from offline retail.

Nandu’s differentiates through chilled — not frozen — chicken. “Chilled is freshly produced, never frozen, stored at 0-4 degrees Celsius. Frozen is stored at -18 degrees Celsius. Chilled chicken must be consumed within 3-4 days,” he explains.

To serve other cities online, the company has established regional production centres and smaller processing units. Roughly half of the one million chicks grown under integrated farming are sold as Nandu’s branded products. Expansion of infrastructure is underway.

Within a few years of launching its hyperlocal omnichannel format, Nandu’s has scaled to a monthly revenue run-rate exceeding Rs 15 crore. It reported revenues of Rs 121 crore in FY24 and Rs 143 crore in FY25, and is on track for a Rs 165 crore run-rate in FY26.

While the company continues to invest in new stores, it emphasises disciplined expansion and strong unit economics. About 60 per cent of revenue comes from chicken sales. However, consumer preference is shifting toward convenience.

Ready-to-Eat (RTE) and Ready-to-Cook (RTC) products grew 20 per cent year-on-year and now contribute nearly 19 per cent of total revenues — a share that is rising steadily.

“Our focus remains the consumer,” Pasuparthy says. “If HORECA demand scales up, we will expand meaningfully. We plan to enter Chennai, Kochi and other metros next year with our omnichannel model. We will also expand our value-added range, launching a new product every week.”

The company is preparing to raise a Series-A round as it sharpens its next phase of growth.