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Name of the company: Supr Daily

Launch date: 2015 Founding team: Puneet Kumar & Shreyas Nagdawane

Location: Mumbai

Funding raised in 2017: $1.62 million

Overall funding raised since starting up: $1.62 million

Industry it operates in: Grocery delivery

While e-commerce has been applauded for saving people the trouble of standing in long queues, most still find themselves ambling to the nearby store every morning for breakfast staples like milk. But, what if one could circumvent this daily drudgery by having it brought to their doorstep every day?

Lifting the lid on digitizing milk delivery in India, a Mumbai-based startup has been burning the midnight oil to ensure people get fresh milk every day at the crack of dawn.

Every household’s spend on daily essentials like milk, form a large slice of the monthly budget, thereby presenting a huge business opportunity, believes CEO and co-founder of Supr Daily, Puneet Kumar, who founded the daily consumables startup with fellow IIT-Bombay batchmate Shreyas Nagdawane in 2015.

Despite being a low-cost product, its ubiquity and consistency across homes egged them on to milk this opportunity.

Also Read: The full list of India’s top funded Startups in 2017

Modern-day milkman

Supr Daily, operated by Supr Techlabs Pvt Ltd, is a subscription-based micro delivery startup that has opened an online market for milk in India. It also offers other daily essentials like bread, eggs and butter.

After entering personal preferences like milk brand (be it Amul, Mother Dairy or any other), its quantity as well as frequency on the app, users can make an advance payment for as little as three days to a whole month. The selected quantities of the items will reach their doorstep at the appointed days before 7:30 in the morning.

Operating much like a modern-day milkman, it matches their efficiency without raising doubts about the quality of the milk delivered.

Supr Daily’s model sources milk directly from dairy farms and delivers it to customers with zero additives. As per an FSSAI study, nearly 70% of milk that arrives in those ubiquitous aluminium cans are grossly watered down – and that is not even the worst of it. This milk can also include additives like detergent, caustic soda, paint and refined oil to lend it the appearance of milk.

“With no middle men involved, we ensure that the milk that reaches you is not tampered with,” reads a post on the startup’s website.

The quantity of orders can also be customized or cancelled altogether to keep it in sync with vacation plans or unplanned trips. “Since we use a Whatsapp account to manage orders, users can have their deliveries organized better than trying to establish contact with a possibly elusive milkman,” Nagdawane says in an interview.

Yet another interesting feature the daily consumables startup offers is the Supr bag.

According to Supr Daily’s website, this fully insulated bag is designed to protect milk by keeping it cold for hours, thereby preventing it from getting spoiled when left outside the door. Available for sale, the startup is offering this bag free of cost for users that subscribe to its service for a whole month.

Milking it

Supr Daily claims to have completed 5,00,000 orders in the last two years – that too with a limited reach of just a few neighbourhoods in Mumbai where it is currently available. These orders have roughly translated to over 600 tonnes of milk, according to its website.

In an interview with Techcrunch earlier this year, Kumar says that by pursuing a micro-delivery model that focuses on a select customer base, the startup has been able to optimise the supply chain and drastically reduce last mile delivery costs. This includes planning routes better and working directly with milk farms. This delivery arrangement has reportedly driven the startup to operational profitability.

In fact, Supr Daily has proved its potential early on when it was selected by US-based accelerator Y Combinator for its three-month mentorship programme that ended in March this year. Joining a cohort of 12 other startups from India, including Playment and WiFi Dubba, it enjoyed a covetous position as it rubbed shoulders with notable investors in the Silicon Valley. Its association with Y Combinator also brings them into the same league as well-established companies like ClearTax, RazorPay and Innov8 who have also been part of the programme in the past.

Little wonder then that it successfully raised a seed funding round of $1.6 million from a host of angel investors, including Y Combinator Partners Paul Buchheit and Jared Friedman. Snapdeal founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal had also placed early bets on this delivery startup.

Confirming the same in another interview with Techcrunch, Kumar had said that having achieved healthy unit economics, the startup will be using the new capital to scale and expand to other tier-one cities in India. “Our burn rate is low, so this money gives us a lot of runway to scale,” he had said.

Although not the first to digitize delivery of daily essentials in India, Supr Daily’s milk-first approach sets it apart in this saturated market, shared by startups like Daily Ninja and MrNeeds. In fact, as per a Techcrunch report, milk makes up the cream of the crop with 90% of Supr Daily’s revenue.

Built to bring order to the highly disorganized cycle of morning milk deliveries, it also addresses quality issues around the product.

The story has been edited. An earlier version of the story had quoted the founders erroneously.