Egging on the brand

The National Egg Coordination Committee Chairman (Northern Region) Harish Juneja said the branded egg concept is slowly growing and “it has a future”. However, the cost of packaging and commission are too high to reduce the retail price of branded eggs, he added.

Kapoor said he had developed a business model which focuses solely on rural India. “We sell chicks to mother units in 11 states, mostly in eastern India, from where vendors take two- to three-month-old chickens and sell them to villagers who were earlier rearing desi (local) birds.”

Impressed by the Keggfarms’ business model, a 50-member team of students from the Harvard Business School visited Kapoor’s poultry farm in Gurgaon. Unlike in the commercial poultry, the bird produced in the Keggfarms is used for both meat and laying eggs.

Daniel J. Isenberg, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, who led the students to Kapoor’s farm, said he was fascinated with the business model as it is only focused on rural India involving stakeholders such as villagers, vendors and women.

The chicken produced by Keggfarms look similar to the local birds. However, Juneja noted that in a commercial farm, the chicken lay as many as 300-325 eggs per year. “We hope to get more (money) as these birds are said to lay 120 eggs compared to 20-25 by a desi chicken,” said Rehman Khan of Manakki village.