Ninjacart Connects Farmers with Consumers Happy Farmers! Happy Consumers

Ninjacart is Bengaluru based and India’s largest B2B fresh produce supply chain company. We had an interaction with Thirukumaran Nagarajan, Co-founder and CEO of Ninjacart. He talks about the rough and tumble of an entrepreneur’s journey and finally switching to B2B from B2C business model.

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1 HOW DID YOU START NINJACART? HOW DID THE VENTURE COMMENCE?

Ninjacart was initially started by six co-founders, including Sharath Loganathan, Vasudevan Chinnathambi, Kartheeswaran KK, Ashutosh Vikram, and Sachin Jose. It all started in 2014 when I met Vasudevan Chinnathambi, Kartheeswaran KK and I were at Taxi4Sure. We worked together and developed a brother-like relationship. Later, I met Ashutosh Vikram and Sachin Jose through CommonFloor, and Sharath has always been part of my entrepreneurial journey as we were classmates from IIM Kozhikode. Before landing on the idea of Ninjacart, I and Sharath had executed various projects which we were unable to expand due to sustainability and scalability issues.

We all got together in 2015 and transformed Shout App, a location-based app (the company I was working on with Sharath at the time), into an e-commerce site. Within Bengaluru, we started operating as a hyperlocal model to serve the end-consumer and helping retailers to take their inventory online. We aimed to deliver fresh produce to direct consumers within 60 minutes of their order. As soon as we began operating, we were inundated with customer concerns about unsafe produce being shipped. We went back to the supermarkets and business outlets to figure out what was going on. We discovered that the supply side of the food supply chain had no structure and was fragmented as farmers relied on middlemen to sell their produce. Retailers, on the other hand, had to compromise with the quality of fresh produce. As a result of the increasing demand for a more streamlined and immediate delivery experience, we decided to move from B2B to B2C.