Egg startup Eggoz eyes profitability by 2024-end

Homegrown egg startup Eggoz has set its eyes on becoming a profitable venture by the end of the current calendar year 2024. In an interview with ANI, Abhishek Negi, one of the three founders of the startup Eggoz Nutrition, said it expects to break even in the next 8-10 months.

The Gurugram-based startup, which currently has an annualised turnover of over Rs 100, aims to grow 2-3x in the upcoming financial year 2024-25, starting April 1. In the near term, Negi said penetrating more into the current markets will be a focus.

Eggoz currently operates primarily in Delhi-NCR, and four other cities in the region, Jaipur, Chandigarh, Lucknow, and Indore. Also, it has a presence in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Mumbai.

It's distribution channels include online and offline. Online sales account for more than three-fourth of the total sales. It is currently available in 2000-3000 offline stores and the target is to take it to 10,000, he said.

"Currently, for the next year, at least, we will focus on these cities... In long term, we are building a playbook to scale up to top 50 Indian cities. We basically aspire to make Eggoz synonymous with eggs," Negi told ANI.

Founded in 2017 by IIT Kharagpur alumni Abhishek Negi, Aditya Singh and Uttam Kumar, Eggoz boasts that its eggs are more nutritious, hygenic, and chemical-free, with a one-day delivery promise. It has 11 farms in NCR, 3 in Bengaluru, and is starting one in Hyderabad, and all are third-party operated.

Talking about Eggitarian as a concept and the trend around it, Negi said people are increasingly recognising the requirement for proteins in diets and eggs are among the best sources of proteins. "Eggs have high bioavailability, the rate at which the human body is absorbing the nutrition," Negi explained.

Sharing an anecdote, he said many individuals in and around Indore in Madhya Pradesh, who were predominantly vegetarian, have now started consuming eggs as a source of protein.

India's per capita annual egg availability grew 1.5x - from 65 to 101 in the past few years, and the aim is to take it further upwards. On an average, Indians consume 35-40 crore eggs daily. Of those, less than 3 per cent are packaged, with rest being in unorganised sector, Negi claimed. "We see that in the next 5-10 years, the packaged egg industry should grow to at least 10 per cent (from 3 per cent now)," Negi said.

"Famers are really squeezed out for income. We use poultry feed, materials like maize, soya, rice, cost of such feeds has doubled in the past few years. At the same time, cost of eggs is almost unchanged in the range of Rs 5-7 per piece. Farmers had to start relying on chemical feeds, concentrate feeds, which have antibiotics and growth hormones,"  Negi said, adding that the industry is completely fragmented and unorganised.

"There is no Amul in egg industry, there's no Ashirwad atta or Daawat rice in this industry...There is a whitespace in the egg market, where we can make our mark," Negi noted.

India's egg market size is roughly Rs 91,000 crore (USD 12 billion), which is growing at 15 per cent CAGR. In next eight years, it is projected that the market size will double, Negi hopes.

Eggoz's range of eggs costs between as low as Rs 8-9 per piece and upwards of Rs 20. Eggs that are otherwise available in the markets trade at Rs 6-7 per piece.

Asked about whether the Eggoz eggs are the product of free range hens, the startup company's founder said a portion of their offerings are free range, but the majority of them are produced through conventional methods. According to Negi, there is a shortage of free range hens and hence cannot fulfil the consumption needs of the masses.

Eggoz claims its repeat customers are as high as 80 per cent. Recently, it has launched a new range of products - egg momos, egg nuggets, and egg muffins, which are available in the marketplace.

"As a company, these are our innovations. We are not just a company of eggs, we are building a FMCG company around it," Negi said.