How Licious started

Abhay Hanjura and Vivek Gupta founded Licious in 2015, tackling a category that most e-commerce entrepreneurs avoided entirely: fresh meat and seafood, a business built on trust, hygiene, and freshness in a market where none of those things could be taken for granted.

The problem they saw

Buying meat and fish in India typically meant a visit to a local butcher or a wet market, where hygiene standards varied widely, cuts were inconsistent, and there was no reliable way to know how the product had been handled before it reached the counter. For many households, this was simply an accepted inconvenience rather than a problem anyone expected to be solved. Hanjura and Gupta, both with backgrounds that gave them an appreciation for the supply chain challenges involved, believed a more controlled, hygienic process could change how people bought meat entirely.

What they sold first

Licious started by selling fresh chicken, mutton, and seafood, cut and packaged in a controlled environment before being delivered directly to customers, cutting out the unpredictable experience of the traditional market. The focus on hygiene and consistent quality was the core of the product itself, not an add-on message layered over an ordinary offering.

The decisions that mattered

Licious invested early in building its own processing and supply chain infrastructure rather than simply aggregating meat from existing local vendors. This was a much harder and more capital-intensive path, but it gave the company control over quality and hygiene standards that would have been impossible to guarantee if it were simply reselling from third parties.

Cold chain logistics became a core capability rather than an afterthought, since meat and seafood have almost no tolerance for delay or temperature lapses. Getting delivery right was as important as getting the product right, because a good cut of meat delivered improperly is still a failure in the customer's eyes.

The company built trust gradually by being transparent about sourcing and processing, which mattered enormously in a category where customers had every reason to be skeptical of a new, unfamiliar name handling something as personal as their family's food.

What a small brand can take from this

Categories that everyone treats as "impossible to fix" are often exactly where the opportunity lies, precisely because competitors have avoided the hard infrastructure work required.

Owning the parts of your supply chain that most affect quality can be worth the extra effort and cost, especially when your product's reputation depends entirely on consistency.

Trust has to be earned deliberately in categories where customers have been let down before. Being transparent about how a product is made or sourced can do more to win a first-time buyer than any advertisement.

If your product depends on doing the hard things right, you can build a store that reflects that with early access.

Varchas Stores is not affiliated with Licious. This is an editorial story based on public reporting, written for founders who are starting out.