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Otipy
Operated by Crofarm Agriproducts Pvt Ltd., Otipy was launched in 2020 by Varun Khurana, a serial entrepreneur and the Founder of Crofarm. Otipy is India’s first community group buying platform for fresh produce and daily essentials. It significantly reduces fresh produce waste, improves its community leaders’ profitability, and makes fresher, healthier food accessible to consumers through state-of-the-art technology used for delivery, distribution, and procurement from farmers.
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1. What are the factors responsible for price inflation?
An increase in the price of the collection of goods, services, or commodities is a frequent phenomenon across the world. In the fresh category, there are majorly 3-4 factors responsible for this price hike. These include weather conditions, middle man, hoarding, and limited information.
An unexpected rainfall/ temperature variance causes significant differences in final production. Hourly exposure to adverse situations impacts the quality of the final fresh produce. Similarly, due to arbitrage, farmers do not benefit according to the market standards rates. E.g., the actual value of selling rates in Delhi NCR does not get transferred to the farmers.
Another vital factor for the price hikes is stock holding: few groups keep the stock, which creates a short-term price imbalance in the market, which could shoot or reduce the market prices. To maintain the balance, Otipy works on multiple parameters to keep price inflation to maintain the balance.
Small farmers and orchard owners face difficulties transporting their produce to faraway marketplaces. They have to auction fruit farms and orchards in advance at cheap rates and sell vegetables in bulk to the middleman at throwaway prices. The mismanagement in the supply chain is another reason for the huge gap in prices that growers sell perishable agricultural commodities for and what the consumer pays.
2. How do you control the price hike?
Otipy works on a beneficial model for both our consumers and farmers. To maintain price inflation, they keep a tab on all the aspects responsible for price hikes, like we review the weather forecast and estimate the production based on that. In the long run, the recent Farm Law 2020 boosts by providing a legal framework to work the farmers directly without any interference from middlemen.
Additionally, Otipy owns warehouses to store the products and handle the wastage and excess production. These warehouses are maintained at a certain temperature to keep the production fresh and stabilize the longevity.
The company sources fresh fruits and vegetables from farmers across Haryana, UP, Delhi, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra. This makes the platform India’s first social commerce model connecting end consumers to farmers through a community of resellers and earning a healthy commission while handling the last-mile delivery of fresh produce.
3. Do you have any programs running with farmers?
We connect and engage with farmers daily. Our special programs allow them to learn more ways to cultivate their crops and enhance production.
Parallelly at Otipy, we encourage Farmers through rewards & recognition. We identify FPOs (Farmers Producer Organizations) and facilitate them to provide remunerative prices to the farmers.
The idea behind this platform is to build a scalable, demand-driven, and tech-enabled supply chain for fresh produce operating at a 35% gross margin. In this process, Otipy/Crofarm aims to help three key stakeholders - farmers, resellers, and consumers.
4. Please explain about the middle man process.
We directly deal with the farmers and FPOs. In a few cases, we use aggregators to create the demand in one place to support small and marginal farmers.
5. How do you ensure that the customer is not bearing burn for the hike price?
We avoid the sudden market fluctuations by keeping the price the same for a few days on our Otipy app. We keep tracking market information to avoid miscommunication/ arbitrage.
Today, Otipy works closely with 20,000+ resellers (mainly women) across Delhi-NCR and serves over 4,00,000 end consumers with fresh produce at their doorstep.
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