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VIJAYA PASTALA MONEY FROM HONEY
Selling
honey, buzzing with profits
Vijaya
Pastala’s venture, Under the Mango Tree, is eyeing a turnover of 60 lakh by
offering gourmet honey.
It may take a moment to come up with a start-up
idea, but it can take years to develop one into a feasible venture. For
Vijaya Pastala, her dream enterprise, Under the Mango Tree (UTMT), took 14
years to shape up.
After acquiring a post graduate degree in regional
planning from the MIT, US, in 1993, Pastala returned to India and stumbled
upon the name for her future venture. She was helping in the rehabilitation
work at Latur, Maharashtra, after the devastating earthquake of 1993, and
worked in a makeshift office with a tin roof, which would become stifling.
So, Pastala and her teammates took refuge in the shade of a mango tree, and
she decided that if she ever started a venture, this is what she would
call.
For the next 12 years, she worked as a development
professional—primarily on livelihood and natural resource management—with
the likes of the World Bank, KfW Bankengruppe, European Commission and the
Aga Khan Foundation. When her son was born in 2003, she changed career
tracks. “I wanted to devote attention to him, so I moved from full-time
employment to the role of a consultant,” says the 47-yearold. It was only
towards the end of 2006 that Pastala started thinking about starting her
own enterprise. “It had to be related to agriculture as I had worked in the
area for a long time,” she says.
It took Pastala about a year to zero in on exactly
what she wanted to do. “The answer was flowers as it has remained a
relatively neglected area. It was while working on this concept that I
decided to deal with honey,” she says.
According to her, the concept of honey is generic
in India, where the packaging seldom specifies the kind of honey being
sold. “In a lot of markets, the makers inform about the type of honey, such
as litchi, mango, raspberry. The other kind is the one that is sourced from
a particular region,” she explains. As Pastala was to discover, gourmet
honey had not been very popular in India. She figured that she could take a
step to change things.
In January 2008, she registered her company as a
proprietorship, while parallelly working on the finer details, such as
getting in touch with local self-help groups and NGOs to source honey from
various parts of the country. In December that year, armed with 3 lakh as
seed capital, UTMT made its debut at the Upper Crafts exhibition in Mumbai.
The capital mainly went into setting up the website and purchasing the
initial quota of honey.
The business model of the company is simple. The
sourced honey is tested, certified, packaged and labelled in a production
plant on rented premises in an industrial area, in Mumbai. The packaged
products are sold online, delivered to over 100 shops in Mumbai and
Bangalore, as well as to a lot of B2B partners like Taj Hotels. In fact,
this month, the company has tied up with Nature’s Basket to supply in the
National Capital Region. Over the next few years, UTMT plans to have a
pan-India presence.
The company turned into a private limited in June
2010 and employs 20 people. The annual purchase of honey has risen from 500
kg in the first year to about 15,000 kg in this fiscal year. The financial
results have been rewarding too, and the company is eyeing a turnover of 60
lakh this year.
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