Hygiene concerns drive online meat sales

As hygiene has become a priority in the current scenario, people are increasingly ordering meat online, breaking away from the traditional habit of buying from local butchers’ shops.

While hygiene has always been the core offering for online players to grab a share in the $30 billion industry, in which 99% of the market is controlled by fragmented unorganised players, the pandemic has created an opportunity for online meat-selling startups, which are seeing unprecedented growth.

Tendercuts, a meat and sea-food company has seen a three-fold growth in per day orders as compared to the pre-Covid period.

“Previously, we were doing roughly about 5,000 orders, now we are doing 15,000 orders per day,” said Nishanth Chandran, Founder, and Chief Executive Officer of TenderCuts.

Chandran mentioned that usually demand on weekends is very high, almost triple as compared to weekdays, but during the lockdown, the demand is high throughout the week.

FreshToHome, a Bengaluru-based e-commerce startup that sells fresh vegetables, fish, chicken, and other kinds of meat has also seen a five-fold increase in demand and a two-fold increase in growth.

Shan Kadavil, Chief Executive Officer at Freshtohome said, “We were doing a million orders per month and now we are doing two million orders.”

Kadavil mentioned when one buys online, they don’t go back to buying offline — there’s a 90% retention rate.

Experts believe that for at least a year, people are going to stick to online meat buying, which will help online players to convince buyers, who for years have preferred local stores.

With cleanliness and hygiene being the primary reasons to switch online, companies claim to have upped their standards further to accommodate the growing concerns.

Deepanshu Manchanda, CEO, online meat brand Zappfresh said, “From providing sanitising wipes for the customers to providing gloves and masks to the delivery boys and ensuring proper hygiene and sanitation of their last mile delivery vehicles, Zappfresh is making sure that everything is being cleaned from time to time.”

Tendercuts has also implemented technology that automatically maps CCTV cameras. “So if a person has not washed hands, we get an alert,” Chandran said.

Companies have also developed new food categories to make the best of the opportunity in hand.

Zappfresh, which is seeing a 1.5x increase in traffic on its website, has recently launched new products such as frozen Tandoori, momos, chicken momos, butter chicken and roomali, DIY/Heat and eat meals.

Tendercuts has also launched new products like Arabian chicken, spicy keema tikka during the lockdown.

Ready to eat, Ready to cook and Marinated categories are the most sought after across companies.