Hatching the Keggs:
How Vinod Kapur made the faceless egg a branded, packaged item!.
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| Vinod Kapur, Chairman, Keggs Farm |
Back in the 1960s, when Kapur was progressing very rapidly in his MNC job — he was already the country head of matchstick major Wimco (then owned by Swedish Match) — his dream of entering poultry farming appeared like an idealist's whimsy. Especially considering that he knew nothing about the business and the primary motivation was that he loved eating eggs for breakfast! He and his wife would sit and talk about what they would call their business, until they came up with the name Keggs (Kapur + eggs = Keggs) and the famous tagline. The egg literally came before the chicken in Kapur's case!
Now that he sells 6-7 crore of the premium Keggs eggs annually and demand is picking up faster than he can meet supply, and the other side of his business — the rural poultry programme — has become a model case study, the 76-year-old Kapur can afford to sit back and smile proudly.
‘Happy eggs
The Keggs eggs' attributes of high quality and trust, built painstakingly through word-of-mouth and usage. No advertising at all. The tan-coloured eggs, which are slightly larger than the normal commercial ones, come from cage-free birds raised in humane conditions, reared on near-organic feed with no growth promoters. “Happy birds lay happy eggs”, is Kapur's ruling motto.
Packed in batches of six in green eco-friendly boxes, the Keggs eggs are priced at Rs 50 as opposed to Rs 25 for the other eggs in the market. Each Keggs egg carries a hologram to prevent counterfeiting — necessary now, as they have spawned copy-cat products.
If a product is good — especially a food product — it will speak for itself and need no advertising,”, Chefs from the premium Four Seasons Hotel in Mumbai came knocking at his farm in Gurgaon, asking for a daily supply of Keggs eggs. Today, Keggs eggs not only reach 500 retail outlets in Delhi/NCR but have also managed to penetrate Chandigarh, Lucknow, Kolkata and Mumbai.
This year, They have peaked at 6.5 lakh eggs per month, while the demand for our eggs stands at 7 lakh .Next year, Kapur's intention is to take the production of branded eggs to 9 lakh.
Diversified business
Of course, branded eggs are only a small part of Kapur's business. From breeding to vaccines to feed, the group addresses all the niches in the poultry business.
In the last 40 years, Kapur has had to keep rejigging his business model to keep pace with the changing economic realities, from the Socialist era to liberalisation to the competitive consumption era. Along the way, he has had to take some calculated risks, especially when he changed from conventional poultry to a radically different model.
Today, Kapur's rural poultry experiment touches a million below-poverty-line families, and has aroused interest in the UN and other development circles, with the model now being replicated in Africa.
The model was simple as Kapur explains in his travels into the interiors, he found that it was the women who raised hens in villages. If only he could give them an acceptable desi-looking scavenging breed but with a far better yield! Some smart genetic engineering resulted in the dual-purpose Kuroiler breed that could produce far more meat and eggs (200 as against the 40 that the village hen used to lay) and yet survive in Indian villages in free-ranging conditions.
The common thread in the rural model and the high-end premium branded model he created, is that he found a gap and stepped neatly into it.
The Kensington Golden variant — again a breed that Kapur's company created — gets a diet of maize, spinach and lots of greens. The result: it lays 250 eggs during its cycle that are not only larger than normal eggs but have a rich golden yolk.
Kapur innovated on the distribution model as well. Typically, eggs move the commodity cycle route — they are sold to middle-men who, in turn, sell to retailers and by the time it reaches the shops, they are 10 days old.
At the Kegg farms no egg is stored for more than three days and if eggs go unsold in the shops for 10 days, they take them back. “You can't get fresher eggs than that,”
Riding on the popularity of his Keggs brandhe is building a foods division. The long-range plan is to move beyond eggs. I have some ideas and will only launch products that are very exceptional and fall into the consumption pattern of existing consumers.
Finally, how does Kapur himself likes his eggs? “I am a fried egg man or like it boiled the classic four-and-a-half minutes,” he says.
Now that he sells 6-7 crore of the premium Keggs eggs annually and demand is picking up faster than he can meet supply, and the other side of his business — the rural poultry programme — has become a model case study, the 76-year-old Kapur can afford to sit back and smile proudly.
‘Happy eggs
The Keggs eggs' attributes of high quality and trust, built painstakingly through word-of-mouth and usage. No advertising at all. The tan-coloured eggs, which are slightly larger than the normal commercial ones, come from cage-free birds raised in humane conditions, reared on near-organic feed with no growth promoters. “Happy birds lay happy eggs”, is Kapur's ruling motto.
Packed in batches of six in green eco-friendly boxes, the Keggs eggs are priced at Rs 50 as opposed to Rs 25 for the other eggs in the market. Each Keggs egg carries a hologram to prevent counterfeiting — necessary now, as they have spawned copy-cat products.
If a product is good — especially a food product — it will speak for itself and need no advertising,”, Chefs from the premium Four Seasons Hotel in Mumbai came knocking at his farm in Gurgaon, asking for a daily supply of Keggs eggs. Today, Keggs eggs not only reach 500 retail outlets in Delhi/NCR but have also managed to penetrate Chandigarh, Lucknow, Kolkata and Mumbai.
This year, They have peaked at 6.5 lakh eggs per month, while the demand for our eggs stands at 7 lakh .Next year, Kapur's intention is to take the production of branded eggs to 9 lakh.
Diversified business
Of course, branded eggs are only a small part of Kapur's business. From breeding to vaccines to feed, the group addresses all the niches in the poultry business.
In the last 40 years, Kapur has had to keep rejigging his business model to keep pace with the changing economic realities, from the Socialist era to liberalisation to the competitive consumption era. Along the way, he has had to take some calculated risks, especially when he changed from conventional poultry to a radically different model.
Today, Kapur's rural poultry experiment touches a million below-poverty-line families, and has aroused interest in the UN and other development circles, with the model now being replicated in Africa.
The model was simple as Kapur explains in his travels into the interiors, he found that it was the women who raised hens in villages. If only he could give them an acceptable desi-looking scavenging breed but with a far better yield! Some smart genetic engineering resulted in the dual-purpose Kuroiler breed that could produce far more meat and eggs (200 as against the 40 that the village hen used to lay) and yet survive in Indian villages in free-ranging conditions.
The common thread in the rural model and the high-end premium branded model he created, is that he found a gap and stepped neatly into it.
The Kensington Golden variant — again a breed that Kapur's company created — gets a diet of maize, spinach and lots of greens. The result: it lays 250 eggs during its cycle that are not only larger than normal eggs but have a rich golden yolk.
Kapur innovated on the distribution model as well. Typically, eggs move the commodity cycle route — they are sold to middle-men who, in turn, sell to retailers and by the time it reaches the shops, they are 10 days old.
At the Kegg farms no egg is stored for more than three days and if eggs go unsold in the shops for 10 days, they take them back. “You can't get fresher eggs than that,”
Riding on the popularity of his Keggs brandhe is building a foods division. The long-range plan is to move beyond eggs. I have some ideas and will only launch products that are very exceptional and fall into the consumption pattern of existing consumers.
Finally, how does Kapur himself likes his eggs? “I am a fried egg man or like it boiled the classic four-and-a-half minutes,” he says.
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