How Wholsum Foods Sales Grew ~10x times in 6 months with EasyEcom

About

WholSum Foods is a D2C organic snacking brand founded by mompreneurs, Meghana Narayan and Shauravi Malik, with the tagline ‘Made By Mothers' '. The duo got to talking at a party in London, United Kingdom and found that they shared several common academic and professional interests. They later became parents, which alerted them to a gap in the consumer market where children were concerned. 

Their research revealed that 1 in every 4 children in India was obese, or at risk of being so, as a result of regularly consuming unhealthy, processed foods that were on the shelves of every grocery store. The company created Slurrp Farm in October 2016 with the intent to replace these with healthier superfoods such as Ragi, Jowar and Bajra- all staples in traditional Indian households.  Mille, a play on the word “millets”  followed soon after,comprising products made with -you guessed it! Umang Bhattacharya came on board as the creative director of all marketing efforts, and the trio invested all of their time, capital and efforts to create a brand with a distinct tone of voice. 

1 pureed fruit-n-veggies prototype, two products in the pilot launch and 7 years of R&D later, Slurrp Farm has grown ~500x with 100+ products sold in 800+ stores across India, the U.A.E and the United Kingdom. 

Inventory Liquidation During Supply Chain Disruptions- The Fulfillment Accuracy Challenge

Slurrp Farm sells its products at physical storefronts as well as its own website and multiple eCommerce marketplaces such as Blinkit, Zepto, Amazon, Flipkart and FirstCry. The first challenge of multi-channel selling was in determining how much inventory was used up to fulfill orders.

The logistics team faced challenges during the pandemic with- 

1. A temporary disruption to operations when eCommerce market players sent out a notice to the company to sell minimum 70% of stock held at their warehouses.
2. Identifying and categorizing products with low shelf life in order to run discounts and revise pricing.
3. A 60% error rate in order processing, with 23% of orders returned due to wrong quantity, product type and price differences.
4. Liquidating inventory in time to fulfill seasonal demand.
5. Skewed visibility that impeded setting inwarding criteria by channel.
6. Considerable man hours that went into separating identification codes to determine the stocks to pick for fulfillment. 
7. Having to manually punch POs per platform in the absence of API integrations with specific QCommerce vendors, such as Blinkit and FirstCry. 

Operating out of a mother warehouse in Bengaluru with micro hubs in Delhi and Bombay, SlurrpFarm realized that the only way to streamline inventory and warehouse operations for offline and online channels was through an automated eCommerce engine for daily operations.

How EasyEcom Helped the Brand Regain Absolute Visibility

Wholsum Foods registered a 10x growth between 2020 to 2021 within 6 months of coming onboard EasyEcom's AI driven Inventory Management System. The limitless technical configurations and platform integrations against the backdrop of a robust architecture enabled the brand to

‍

1. Get 100% stock visibility of inventory movement and  system-generated notifications when the stock reached X percentage at a particular warehouse. This helped the logistics team move operations quickly.

2. Get 100% real-time visibility of stock nearing expiry, and consequently planned out discounts to sell products while they had adequate shelf-life remaining.

3. Save an average of INR 4200/day with a 100% reduction in order fulfillment error rates.

4. Create ~99.99% accurate estimation models with demand forecasting reports.

5. Achieve 99% order tracking accuracy with pre-collated B2C order data via a unified dashboard. 

6. Improve batch pick-pack efficiency at the warehouse by 95% by automatically diverting orders from non serviceable pin codes to self-ship mode by default.

7. Streamline inward process with live order tracking and auto-allocation via APIs.

8. Bring down costs by ~64.5% for all self-ship orders with enhanced visibility, order tracking and inventory planning.

9. Streamline warehouse operations and enhanced team productivity by utilizing HHT when performing stock levels and inventory tracking.

‍

Here’s what the V.P. Operations, WholSum foods has to say-

“EasyEcom has been a pivotal contributor to SlurrpFarm’s ability to streamline both inventory and warehouse operations. We anticipated that the scale of disruption brought by the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020 would force us to scale back, but the reverse was true- we could fulfill the demand surge, thanks to the added visibility and saw spectacular growth.The logistics team is able to figure out where orders come from and what inventory went into it. Planning our inventory, tracking orders and allocating inventory to goods have collectively helped us to save our costs.I would rate EasyEcom a 9/10 for getting our order processing back on track. The best part is that the team is ~24/7 on hand to troubleshoot and resolve any snags and have successfully deployed all configuration requests from our end till date.”

Bhartendu Kedia, 

Vice President of Operations,

Wholsum Foods

‍