India D2C food brand Country Delight gets $108m Series D

Venturi, a consumer-focused growth-stage investor set up in 2019 by a former Verlinvest executive in the region, contributed at least USD 24.8m via its debut fund, which closed on USD 175m in April.

SWC Global and Trifecta Capital came in as new investors. They were joined by all of the company’s existing backers, which include IIFL Asset Management, Elevation Capital, Orios Venture Partners, and Matrix Partners India. Total funding to date comes to USD 147m.

Country Delight was founded in 2013 with a view to delivering natural, fresh, and minimally processed milk directly to customers’ doorsteps. The idea was to leverage technology to source a superior product from farmers and to provide a hassle-free experience to consumers.

The company has since expanded beyond dairy – including cheese, curds, and ghee – to cover a range of daily pantry essentials such as fruit, vegetables, bread, and eggs. Farm-to-home delivery is guaranteed within 36 hours from sourcing, which in the case of milk means within 36 hours of milking the cow. The billing cycle is fortnightly.

Country Delight is said to have grown 10x in the past three years, with more than 1.5m customers served to date. Its following is built largely on word of mouth rather than discount offers. Rishika Chandan, an executive managing director at Venturi, highlighted the company’s positive customer feedback and strong loyalty.

“We have been very impressed by their product-first approach, vertically integrated business model and ability to expand across categories,” Chandan said in a statement. “India has about 20 million affluent households across the top 50 cities that could benefit from Country Delight’s range of products, making this a huge opportunity that has remained largely commoditised thus far.”

Chetan Naik, a private equity fund manager at IIFL Asset Management, described Country delight as “the only vertically integrated player with a direct-to-consumer channel, owning the entire farm-to-fork ecosystem.”

IIFL Asset Management is also an investor in Licious, which claims to have established India’s first farm-to-fork model with a digital-enabled supply chain for own-branded meat and seafood. Licious raised a USD 150m round at a valuation of USD 1.6bn in March. Naik is a board observer for both Country Delight and Licious.

The investment opportunity in this space is based on several overlapping themes. Quality consciousness is on the rise in India as are customer expectations for transparency, clean products, and healthier food choices. In the unorganised sector, fresh food is easier to source, but quality is unreliable. In the organised sector, freshness and naturalness are likewise unreliable.

India’s fresh food and staples market is set to cross USD 50 billion by 2025, according to Avendus Capital, Country Delight’s financial advisor for the Series D. More than 60% of the fresh food market in the country is unorganized with limited cold storage capabilities, a fragmented logistics chain and inadequate visibility of product quality across the supply chain.

• Tweet  
• Facebook  
• LinkedIn  
• Google plus  
• Save this article  
• Send to  

• Topics
• South Asia
• Consumer
• Expansion
• India
• Venturi Partners
• Temasek Holdings
• Trifecta
• IIFL Wealth Managment
• Elevation Capital
• Orios Venture Partners
• Matrix Partners
• TMT
• Logistics
• e-commerce
• Food
• Agriculture