Krishi Star

We are committed to addressing urban livelihoods, rural incomes, and environmental sustainability. Our project connects healthy, affordable food sourced from smallholder farmers and cottage industries to urban consumers. If scaled across India, it would improve/create livelihoods for thousands of farmers and urban micro-entrepreneurs and indirectly impact millions through access to healthy food and environmental sustainability.  

Our marketing and distribution are primarily through a scalable network of micro-entrepreneurs. These micro-entrepreneurs are supported by multiple value-aligned support partners.

Our supply chain is “farm-to-fork” wherein products are sourced from farmer-owned businesses and cottage industries. These products are tracked in the long-term through the integration of source traceability technology to ensure transparent chain of custody and consumer awareness. 

Our products are healthy, nutritious, affordable food for urban consumers. We focus on products that incorporate sustainable agricultural practices such as regenerative farming such as organic, pulses, and natural fruit jams.

Our project aims to solve several problems related to urban livelihoods, rural incomes, and environmental sustainability. In addition, it contributes to access to healthy food.

(1) Urban Livelihoods

India’s urban population faces a livelihood crisis, the urban unemployment rate, exacerbated by lockdown regulations and fears, has risen 8.1% since July 2021.

(2) Rural Incomes

India’s ~120M small/marginal farmers lack direct market linkages, forcing many into reliance on intermediaries with which they have little power and no alternative in the event of difficulties. Farmers receive meager prices (as low as 25% of consumer price) for their harvest.

(3) Environmental Sustainability

Traditional farm practices contribute to global environmental issues e.g. agriculture generates 10-14% of GHG emissions and adversely impacts farming. Regenerative farming offers a solution that would reduce reliance on inputs, improve soil health and benefit the environment. Through our procurement of produce grown through regenerative farming methods and our soil-monitoring partnerships, we hope to address this gap.

(4) Healthy Food

The use of pesticides and chemicals have known health implications - excessive levels of these chemicals in the food can cause a variety of health ailments Through our model’s end-to-end impact focus, transparency, and cost-effective sales and distribution, our goal is to help bridge this gap and increase access for urban consumers to affordable, healthy food products.

Our solutions directly serve multiple stakeholders – urban consumers, urban micro-entrepreneurs, and smallholder farmers and cottage industry producers. 

(1) Consumers

We give value to the customer through (a) healthy and affordable food products and (b) the opportunity for conscious consumerism. Our impact-driven supply chain ensures that healthy products reach customers with quality assurance and traceability. Furthermore, conscious consumerism is enabled because consumers can track environmental and social impact and make direct personal connections with micro-entrepreneurs and support communities.

(2) Micro-entrepreneurs

We create livelihood opportunities and build capacity. Through our efforts, micro-entrepreneurs train in business areas such as marketing and finance; they also get the opportunity to innovate and grow their own entrepreneurial ventures. In addition, the re-seller platform gives them the opportunity to build their own brand.

(3) Smallholder Farmers and Cottage Industry Producers

We enable them to increase their revenues by providing a market linkage and price premium for their products.

(4) Global Population

One of the challenges to the propagation of regenerative farming is the numerous counterclaims of lack of evidence and false reporting on its environmental benefits. Through our technology partners, we will use hyperspectral satellite data, cloud-based analytics, and IoT-linked spectrometers, to map and track key metrics such as surface and subsurface soil moisture, soil organic carbon, and soil nutrients. Tracking this data over time, we can measure the impact of the various forms of regenerative farming being undertaken by our farmers and contribute this knowledge to the scientific community.

Our intervention aligns with the main goal of ‘Future of Work’ challenge by creating livelihood opportunities for people from socio-economically marginalized backgrounds and increasing incomes of smallholder farmers and cottage industries. For micro-entrepreneurs in particular, our intervention creates livelihood opportunities, builds capacity/skills, and provides a platform to build their own personal brands.

In addition to our direct impact in supporting vulnerable populations, our intervention also indirectly supports them by building connections between these stakeholders and end consumers. Through these connections and our consumer-engagement initiatives, we strive to help catalyze the greater conscious consumerism movement.

Bryan Lee
CEO / Director

Our project is innovative in three primary areas (a) cost-effective, scalable marketing (b) impact-driven supply chain, and (c) scalable technology integrations.

(1) Cost-effective, Scalable Marketing

Our model is cost-effective and scalable primarily because of our multi-stakeholder approach. Our model is scalable without heavy resource investment because our stakeholders are value-aligned - their impact motivations align to the model. Stakeholders contribute their own resources to help the model grow. For example, our capacity-building partner is motivated to create urban livelihoods. In addition, this stakeholder-centric approach to scaling will enable geographic scale; we are connected to a network of similar stakeholders across India.

(2) Impact-driven Supply Chain

Our model is driven by an end-to-end impact-driven supply chain. We take a holistic approach to designing impact into our supply chain by considering impact opportunities in each element. For example, environmental sustainability is driven both by procurement from farmers engaged in regenerative farming and by distribution through environmental-friendly packaging and sustainable cold-chain technology. We also employ micro-entrepreneurs and procure from small farmers and cottage industries.

(3) Scalable Technology Integrations

We are co-creating supply chain technology to create traceability and accountability; this technology benefits our model and can later be independently scaled integrated into other impact models. For example, we are co-creating an integrated re-seller platform that integrates and tracks quality-control across the supply chain and provides brand identity to the micro-entrepreneurs. This technology could later be scaled to fit other micro-entrepreneur models, thus creating a means by which to scale other livelihood initiatives. 

(1) Expansion Strategy

We plan to expand both through increasing our product range to existing customers and increasing our customer base. Our product range will be expanded through the selective on-boarding of partner suppliers through our impact-diligence process. We will expand our customer base through our multi-stakeholder model as described previously. Our plan is to expand first within Mumbai and eventually to other urban centers such as Pune, Bangalore, and Delhi.

During the first year, initial growth on the market side will be driven through our partnerships in Mumbai As we scale towards our five-year goals, our scalable core competency will be our traceable supply chain (chain-of custody, satellite monitoring, etc) and marketing.

(2) Stage-wise Plans 

First Stage:
Grow core product line and supply chain technology integrations with existing pilot micro-entrepreneurs

Second Stage:
Expand customer-base within Mumbai to additional micro-entrepreneurs

Third Stage:
Expand to new geographies within India

(3) Direct Impact Targets

 Current:
~350 customers
1 internal pilot (dark store distribution and marketing)

Year 1:
1,000 customers
7 micro-entrepreneurs

Year 5:
Direct (expansion to 5 cities)
15,000 customers
100 microentrepreneurs

(4) Indirect Impact Targets

There are 30M farmers currently engaging in the adoption of natural farming in India based on the number of states in India that are currently committed to large-scale propagation of natural farming methods. By helping to add to the body of scientific evidence on the efficacy of natural farming, we will be contributing to these efforts.

We will track impact metrics in each of our key social impact focus areas:

(1) Urban Livelihoods

• Micro-entrepreneurs engaged
• Revenue / Profit to micro-entrepreneurs

(2) Rural Incomes

• Increase in price realization (vis-à-vis market benchmark)

(3) Environmental Sustainability.

• Carbon sequestered (to be estimated using data collected)

The major barrier to implementing this growth strategy will be our ability to maintain the value-alignment of our multiple stakeholders. These stakeholders are key to the success of the model and as such, fostering and maintaining these relationships will be of primary importance.

We plan to maintain value alignment amongst our stakeholders through transparency and impact-focused grant projects (e.g. engaging with 3rd party monitoring and evaluation).

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At the company level, we have embraced the methodologies of design research; senior leadership have all taken several related courses together including Acumen Academy’s “Lean Principles for Social Impact” and “Rapid Prototyping”. We have also hosted internal training sessions on Design thinking.

These skills have been applied to our on-ground strategy and implementation planning - through which we have built our business helping smallholder farmers by sourcing products directly from farmer-owned businesses and marketing through our social impact business food brand since 2014. Beyond these core operations, we have engaged on numerous independent development projects for the benefit of smallholder farmers in partnership with Asian Development Bank and GIZ – e.g. building market linkages for tomato farmers in Maharashtra and building market linkages for apple farmers in Himachal Pradesh. During these projects, we have heavily employed design research methodologies such as tools such as “farmer ride-alongs” and “farmer group co-creation sessions” in designing our solutions.

On an individual basis, the core members of our team have spent the past 7 years across the core operations of Krishi Star including extensive immersive field experience. On the consumer side, we have all been customers of our own product line – having ourselves experienced the difficulties of the Covid-19 lockdown on the availability of high-quality groceries.

Two years ago, our team decided to amend the vision of our company. Our original vision was improving incomes for smallholder farmers, however, we decided we wanted a company whose vision was to have a positive impact on the world around us - employees, stakeholders, community, industry, even competitors. We created a team, one male and one female, that is tasked with building our culture and creating HR policies accordingly.

(1) Inclusion

Our HR team has put together a leadership development course in which all of the senior managers are trained in topics, several of which are meant to ensure that everybody on the team feels valued and respected. Two, in particular, are our modules on “judgment-free feedback” and “conflict resolution” which focus on navigating interpersonal situations in a manner that allows everybody’s circumstances to be heard and understood.

(2) Diversity

The team has diverse backgrounds across sexuality, ethnic background, religion, and age.

(3) Equity

We have implemented an evidence-based feedback system wherein feedback positive and negative is documented and overseen by the impartial HR department. In case of any actions or issues raised, there is a formal review process in which tangible evidence must be presented to warrant action.

(1) Amana – Capacity-building for micro-entrepreneurs
(2) Earth Analytics - Satellite-based soil monitoring

Our core activities are:

• Sourcing agri and cottage industry food products
• Maintaining a traceable, quality-focused supply chain
• Supply chain operations including – warehousing, logistics
• Marketing and branding
• On-boarding and capacity-building for micro-entrepreneurs
• Impact tracking – price benchmarking, sustainability analysis

These activities allow us to add value for our stakeholders:

• Customers – Unique, quality, and healthy food products and emotional benefit
• Farmers and Cottage Industries – Higher price realization
• Micro-entrepreneurs – Facilitated business opportunities and ongoing support