Decoding Budget 2022 for MSMEs, FMCG brands making a splash in the Indian market, and other top stories of the week
This week, SMBStory also covered the journey of FMCG brands Ceres Foods and COFTEA, which are making a niche in the Indian market with their ready-to-cook liquid masalas and tea/coffee premixes.
Presenting Union Budget 2022-23, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman mapped out four major priorities: PM Gati Shakti; inclusive development; productivity enhancement and investment, sunrise opportunities, energy transition and climate action; and financing of investments.
“This Budget seeks to lay the foundation and give a blueprint to steer the economy over the Amrit Kaal of the next 25 years,” she said.
FM Sitharaman hailed the startup community, calling them “drivers of growth for our economy” and proposed an extension of tax incentives in the wake of COVID-19 for another year. She expanded the guarantee cover of Emergency Credit Line Guarantee Scheme (ECLGS) by Rs 50,000 crore to Rs 5 lakh crore and extended it to March 31, 2023, and revamped the Credit Guarantee Fund Trust for Micro and Small Enterprises (CGTMSE) with credit of Rs 2 lakh crore for micro and small enterprises.
Sitharaman also announced that programmes with an outlay of Rs 6,000 crore would be rolled out in the next five years to accelerate MSME performance.
While all these initiatives aim to bolster MSMEs, stakeholders of the ecosystem see them as “incomplete” and are hankering for more.
However, the Budget did focus on expanding domestic manufacturing to ensure complete aatmanirbharta, but stakeholders of the MSME ecosystem feel the need for more.
Ceres Foods
In 2013, Deb Mukherjee felt it was time to move away from his decade-long career as an investment banker. He had seen his father working in the hospitality industry for 40 years, which is why the food business seemed a natural transition.
He launched Ceres Hospitality in 2014, a Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) chain, and over the next five years, scaled it up to 45 outlets across Maharashtra. In 2019, Deb realised that maintaining consistency, which is paramount to scale an F&B company, was the most daunting task.
Deb and his team started working on a solution that would ensure that “food can be prepared without any specific skill.”
The real breakthrough came when the private equity fund, Bluestone Capital, invited Ceres to help them set up a cloud kitchen business in Sri Lanka. For this project, Ceres rolled out a series of ready-to-eat products such as those in the Biryani category, South Indian Chettinad, Burmese Khao Suey, and more.
When these products saw decent growth on foreign shores, Deb decided to implement the same concept in India.
This is how Mumbai-based ready-to-cook startup came into existence in 2020. Deb was also joined by co-founders Amit Mange and Jagmandeep Singh in the same year. Currently, Ceres offers 13 products in two categories -- Oriental sauces and Indian gravies.
The manufacturing is 100 percent sourced through four units located in Maharashtra and Gujarat. Last month, Ceres clocked Rs 25 lakh revenue.
COFTEA
While India is one of the largest consumers of tea, accounting for about 30 percent of the world tea output, coffee has an equally enthusiastic fan base in the country.
For Ankit Chhaparia, Founder of , this love for beverages inspired him to start his venture.
A Chartered Accountant from Kolkata, Ankit had always dreamt of becoming an entrepreneur. After working for a few years in cities like Bengaluru and Hyderabad, he came back to Kolkata in 2013 to start a business.
“During those days when I was working, I observed how drinking tea or coffee from vending machines was a big trend,” he tells SMBStory. Recognising the massive opportunity in this space, he decided to start a vending machines trading business in September 2014.
He would outsource the vending machines from factories situated in the northern part of the country and would sell or rent them out to corporates such as Senco Gold, IRCTC, etc. The cost of these machines started at Rs 17,000 and went up to Rs 1.4 lakh.
So far, COFTEA has installed 100 coffee/tea vending machines across the country. Later, Ankit launched a vertical, which manufactures and sells tea and coffee premixes. COFTEA’s unit has a capacity of producing 500 tonnes of premixes per annum.
Edited by Megha Reddy