Wingreens Farms acquires Monsoon Harvest, aims for an IPO

Wingreens Farms has made its fourth acquisition by taking over Monsoon Harvest, a Coimbatore-based cereal brand. This move comes after the Gurugram-based firm took over Saucery, a Mumbai-based dips brand, about three weeks ago.

The seller of snacks and sauces acquired 100 percent stake in Green Light Foods, which own Monsoon Harvest, and has decided to keep the cereal brand's promoters — Uma Machani and Sri Sethuram — on board to run the brand.

"Wingreens will quickly scale the Monsoon Harvest brand by taking it offline. After merging our sales team with Raw Pressery's, earlier this year, we have built a strong national retail footprint," said Arjun Srivastava, Founder and Director, Wingreens Farms.

Monsoon Harvest will also let Wingreens Farms enter the breakfast category, where it made some headways with its breakfast mixes brand Impatient Baker launched in 2021. The sauces and dips brand had earlier acquired pita chips seller Appitas, in 2019, followed by Raw Pressery, a juice brand that was earlier backed by Sequoia Capital, in March 2021.

The marquee venture capital firm is also an investor in Wingreens Farms.

ALSO READ

How house of D2C brands Join Ventures is tapping India’s $200B celebration market with dark stores

These acquisitions are in line with Wingreens Farms' house of brands strategy, which the company has been eyeing since 2020 when it started focusing on building out its digital channel.

Founded in 2011 by Arjun and wife Anju Srivastava, Wingreens Farms started by selling sauces, snacks and dips in modern retail stores. During the pandemic in 2020, the company put a major focus behind building their brand online and remodelled their existing website to directly deliver to their consumers and also added multiple new categories. These include breakfast and baking mixes, teas, and spices.

"We are also eyeing an IPO (initial public offering) in the next two to three years, and till then, we want to add more brands to our portfolio," said Arjun. Wingreen Farms aims to acquire at least new two brands, across categories, almost every month.

The digital-first or new-age brands saw a major boost during the pandemic as bored at-home consumers jumped online for entertainment, gaming and shopping. As buying anything through digital platforms became a necessity many new brands, including baby care brand Mamaearth and Elevation Capital-backed SUGAR Cosmetics, saw their revenues and valuations soar.

But as the market becomes cluttered with many players catering to similar segments, bigger players have started acquiring smaller firms. Beauty player MyGlamm, which is on an acquisition spree, becoming The Good Glam Group is a case in point.

The Thrasio-like startups including the likes of Ananth Narayanan-led Mensa Brands, Globalbees, and Upscalio, among a slew of other players, are also following a similar strategy.

Wingreens Farms almost doubled their revenue from operation to Rs 102 crore in FY 2019-20 compared with Rs 50.3 crore in FY 2018-19, according to documents sourced from Registrar of Companies (ROC). The company also incurred an operating loss of Rs 24 crore (FY20) and Rs 16.5 crore (FY19).