Sunday Reflections (Food System Transformers, Missing Seed Growers, Pluckk Vs KisaanSay)
Dear Friends,
Greetings from Hyderabad, India. Welcome to Sunday Reflections where I reflect on what I’ve written and ask myself, In doing what I am doing, what am I really doing?
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Pluckk Vs KisaanSay: A Study in Contrasts
Both focus on farm-to-door. Both raised capital recently. Both have similar growth trajectories. And yet their DNA is as divergent as it could get.
Two Indian food startups both raised funding in the same week of April 2026.
One raised ₹100 crore and wants to sell cold-pressed juice in UAE. The other raised ₹34 crore and wants to put Kalanamak rice from UP and Chambal ghee from Madhya Pradesh on Delhi living room shelves — with the farmer collective's name on the packet.
Pluckk is in perishables — tomatoes, broccoli, avocado, pre-cut salads. These require cold chain, dark store proximity, 24-hour sell-through, and continuous replenishment logistics. Every unit of revenue comes with high wastage risk and time-sensitive delivery cost.
KisaanSay is in shelf-stable staples — rice, ghee, atta, spices, dry fruits, honey, jaggery, cold-pressed oil. These products have months of shelf life, require no cold chain, tolerate longer delivery windows, and can be sold through any channel without a Blinkit partnership. FWIW. KisaanSay did partner with Blinkit recently for their staples
More in a recent subscriber-only edition of Krishidotsystem
P.S. After I wrote this, I received an interesting comment that implored me to compare Pluckk, Kisaansay with Noice.
Noice operates as a quick-commerce private label incubated within the Swiggy ecosystem. It focuses heavily on fast-moving, high-margin consumer categories like cold-pressed juices (such as mango, ABC, and sugarcane) and frozen foods. Although quick commerce doesn’t do fresh food well, there are interesting possibilities that leverage quick-commerce data to identify and fulfill urban demand for convenience and impulse purchases.
Why Are Indian Seed Growers Leaving?
The economics of producing seed at the farm level have been deteriorating across every major crop category for over a decade.
What are the six archetypes of seed growers in India? What can be done to reverse this trend ? I explore four options viz., 1) Complete managed farming operations. 2) Leveraging genetics. 3) Partial mechanisation 4) Newer areas for seed production. One of these options is also part of the problem.
These are challenging times for seed growers in India. The economics of producing seed at the farm level have been deteriorating across every major crop category for over a decade.
The government is simultaneously subsidizing both sides of this problem.
In my home state, Oil palm has taken over seed production at large.
Under NMEO-OP, the National Mission on Edible Oils — Oil Palm, farmers in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka receive a capital subsidy, a drip irrigation subsidy, and a government Fair and Remunerative Price that is announced before planting and guaranteed by the state.
This is a genuinely generous package, and it is working — oil palm acreage is growing.
The same government, through a different department, is expressing concern about grower exit from seed production and calling for better field officer coverage.
Of course, the 'seed production farmer' is not a monolithic identity in India. The tomato seed grower in Haveri, Karnataka, the cotton seed grower in Yavatmal, Maharashtra, and the bajra seed grower in Barmer, Rajasthan, operate under fundamentally different agronomic, economic, and social conditions.
More in a recent subscriber-only edition of KrishidotSystem.
P.S. Ravi Kumar Tomar made an interesting comment.
“All problems mentioned in last column does exist but Seed Production Industry as a whole is not declining in India. It’s just that farmers choose to go for Oil Palm due to ease & long term security BUT seed production acreages keep growing. Just the cluster shifts to some other location. There is a consolidation of such growers too via professional Seed Production companies”
Missing Middle in Agri-Mechanisation Landscape
If you look at India’s mechanisation landscape, there is a missing middle no one seems to be talking about. When I triage the price points and capabilities, the following tiers are emerging.
Lowest Tier:
Single-purpose walking machines, suitable for inter-row work in vegetable plots or orchards, start at 36 K INR (~390 USD) and could go all the way upto 1.65L INR (~1769 USD). These have constraints in terms of walking operator and 2-5 implements.
Second Tier:
Power tillers in India start from around ₹1.65 lakh, with VST Shakti models pricing at ₹2.04 lakh and Kirloskar models running ₹2-3 lakh. These are also walking type. There are no power take-off system for most implements.
Missing Middle:
The missing middle exists at ₹2.5L – ₹3.75L tier (~2681 to 4027 USD). Those in which the operator is seated + 4WD + heavy tillage + multi-implement.
Products exist in this price band, but all current offerings sacrifice at least two critical capabilities.
More in a recent subscriber-only edition of Krishidotsystem
P.S. Bhushan Darekar shared how his product thesis aligns with the missing middle in agri-mechanisation landscape. He also shared their roadmap with price point evolving from Robot as a Service to direct selling.
“Today’s options either a) Depend heavily on human physical effort (walking machines), or b) Are too large, expensive, and not suited for inter-row operations (tractors).
We are still converting human biological energy into farm work, often under harsh conditions (chemical exposure, fatigue, labor shortage). In many ways, this is unsustainable — both economically and from a health perspective. We are building the Farm Guardian Rover — a multi-utility, electric, compact, and semi-autonomous field robot designed specifically for horticulture:
A) Separates the operator from the machine (remote + autonomous operation)
B) Works in narrow rows and tough field conditions
C) Supports multiple farm operations (spraying, interculture, etc.)
D) Designed at a practical price point for Indian farmers and service providers
Kashmir Agripreneurs Meet
I am gearing up for Kashmir Agripreneurs Meet on 2nd June in collaboration with NewGen IEDC – Innovation & Entrepreneurship Development Centre, University of Kashmir.
Despite the conflict this region has witnessed over decades, Agriculture has been the most resilient sector in this region for three reasons.
1) Altitude
Kashmiri saffron grows at 1,600 to 1,800 meters above sea level in the Karewa highlands between the Pir Panjal and Great Himalayan ranges. This altitude produces the specific combination of temperature differential, soil drainage, and UV exposure that gives the stigma its biochemical profile: higher crocin (coloring strength), higher safranal (flavor), higher picrocrocin (bitterness). These are the three parameters by which saffron is graded internationally. Kashmir maximizes all three.
2) Terroir
Kashmiri apples taste the way they do because the Karewa soil, the valley's night-day temperature differential, and the high-altitude sunlight angle are an unreproducible combination.
3) Tradition
J&K holds nine GI-tagged products: saffron, Pashmina, Kani shawl, walnut wood carving, sozani craft, papier-mache, hand-knotted carpet, Khatamband, and Basmati.
Besides, entrepreneurs and farmers joining us from Kashmir - Ashfaq Syed, Irshad Ahmad Dhar, we have a motley crew of entrepreneurs joining us from various parts of India
Jagadeesh Sunkad
Partha Chakraborty
Padma Satyamurthy
Ashok Banerjee
Jofi Joseph
Milan M.
Komal Jaiswal
How can we accelerate agripreneurship in Kashmir? How do we integrate Kashmiri agripreneur ecosystem with India's agripreneurial ecosystem? Why do I host Agripreneur Meets?
My life time goal is to build a mycorrhizal network of changemakers working on transforming food and agriculture systems. There is no agenda other than learning and understanding what different change makers are working on, wearing a variety of hats, whether through finance, entrepreneurship or culture.
If you are an agripreneur from Kashmir, do fill the interest form so that we can bring the right set of entrepreneurs in the room.
Food System Transformers
Besides my passion for food and agriculture, I have a long standing love affair with the Indian epic Mahabharata.
In my earlier life, I wore a colourful storyteller career hat that profited handsomely from leveraging Mahabharata as a story technology kaleidoscope and today, a large part of my leadership coaching owes its existence to the frameworks that are built on Mahabharata.
With more than one hundred thousand sanskrit stanzas in verse, eight times longer than The Iliad and The Odyssey put together, it is the longest composition of the world, narrating the greatest story ever told.
My relationship with Mahabharata transformed when my Yoga Mentor showcased how the epic could be a powerful mirror of self-discovery.
Essentially speaking, you can read Mahabharata in three ways
1) Historical Text 2) Inspiration 3) A Mirror to Discover Your Self.
The first two are outside-in ways of reading Mahabharata, and the third is inside-out.
How do you leverage Mahabharata as an inside-out mirror to discover yourself? As my Yoga Mentor Raghu Ananthanarayanan elaborates in his fascinating book, Five Seats of Power, Mahabharata explores five archetypal seats of power viz.,
1) Yudhishtra: Structure and Order
2) Bhima: Adventure and Sensitivity
3) Nakula: Service and Compassion
4) Sahadeva: Knowledge and Inquiry
5) Arjuna: Integration and Simultaneity
It’s fascinating when I apply these five archetypes in the context of food systems.
More in a recent edition of Krishidotsystem.
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