From AI-led demand forecasting to meat sentiment—why Licious built its own supply chain

“Covid was both a lifetime opportunity and the toughest stress test of our organisational muscle,” recalled Vivek Gupta, Co-founder of Licious, at the finale session of the ET Soonicorns Summit 2025 in Bengaluru. The pandemic years, he said, brought both extraordinary momentum and lasting caution. “In the first three months, we became 3x (our business tripled), then hit full capacity, then 2x again (it doubled again) in wave two. Consumers poured in, but when the slowdown came, those who hadn’t come for the right reasons went off. Rebuilding cost metrics and supply chain fundamentals took us 18 to 24 months.” It was a reminder that even extraordinary tailwinds can recede, leaving founders to confront the hard work of rebuilding.

That framing set the tone for the fireside chat, titled ‘The Next Decade of Consumer Startups: Lessons from Licious’, moderated by ETtech.com Editor Samidha Sharma. For Gupta and his co-founder Abhay Hanjura, the most enduring lesson from their decade-long journey has been the ability to adapt. As Hanjura put it, “The number one challenge for any founder is to constantly rediscover themselves. The founder the company needs at birth versus the founder it needs at scale, profitability, or IPO preparation—these are very different.”

From legitimacy to investor “waviness”

That ability to adapt was especially important in the early years, when legitimacy itself was elusive. “From family, from investors, from this country—it was always, ‘India mein meat venture?’ (A meat venture in India),” Gupta said. “Investors funded every single direct-to-consumer (D2C) category, but meat? They weren’t interested.” Only when numbers spoke did capital follow. “Legitimacy came slightly later in our lives,” he added. In hindsight, that persistence before capital became the foundation for resilience when the Covid highs gave way to market corrections. Eventually, Licious became India’s D2C meat and seafood unicorn, achieving unicorn status in 2021.

If legitimacy was the early battle, navigating what Hanjura described as the “waviness” of investor moods became the later one. In just a few years, he pointed out, sentiment has swung from chasing growth-at-all-costs to demanding profitability to insisting on IPOs. “We won’t go public just because the tent is cheap, the wedding hall is available, and the per-plate rate is low,” he said to laughter from the audience. “You don’t get married because the hall is cheap. You get married when the timing is right.” Gupta reinforced the point, describing IPOs as “a milestone, not the end of the journey.” For now, the company is growing at 40% year-on-year, profitability is “at arm’s length” and offline expansion is underway with 45 company-owned stores, expected to double by next year.

Quick commerce, not necessarily a silver bullet

It is in this context that the company’s most deliberate choice stands out: owning the entire supply chain. Some critics have argued that this slowed Licious down. Hanjura disagreed. “We never wanted to run fast in the wrong direction. Maybe it slowed us down, but it avoided imminent mistakes. You’ll hear about delayed delivery complaints, but never that the meat packet stank. That would be ‘operation successful, patient dead.’ And we’d never allow that.” For meat, he argued, the consumer response to a bad experience is visceral. “Nobody gets traumatised by a bad rajma or tomato. But with meat, it happens.” That farm-to-fork control, they believe, is the company’s moat in a fragmented meat market valued at over USD 55 billion, but with over 90% of it remaining in the unorganised sector. According to a 2023 Economic Times report,

Independent ecommerce analyst and Datum Intelligence advisor Satish Meena estimated the size of India’s online meat and seafood market at around ₹2,500–3,000 crore.

This philosophy also explains their guarded approach to quick commerce, a channel many D2C brands rely on for scale. Gupta was blunt about its limits for fresh meat. “If Swiggy has a hundred dark stores, each carrying around 300 stock-keeping units (SKUs) with just a two-day shelf life, wastage skyrockets. So, they end up stocking only the top five products.” Instead, Licious has built its own logistics and uses artificial intelligence (AI) to forecast demand at a neighbourhood level, adding delivery centres gradually. “Whatever quick commerce can do in three months, we’ll do in twelve,” Gupta said. Already, 40–50% of Licious consumers receive 30-minute delivery. Ready-to-cook and ready-to-eat—currently about 10% of the business—will scale better through such platforms and is expected to grow tenfold in the coming years.

Even as they defended this deliberate pace, the founders acknowledged that abundant capital had sometimes led them astray. “Too much money sometimes makes you do too many experiments—offline stores, spices, plant-based protein exports. None worked because they were half-hearted,” Gupta admitted. It was in this context that Hanjura offered one of the most memorable lines of the evening: “It’s the hardest-to-digest corn in the world,” he said of the unicorn label. Gupta agreed: “It gives two days of high, a lot of attention, but creates pressure. We didn’t start this company to become a unicorn.”

The deeper point, however, was about people. “Get smart people, yes, but also build alongside them,” said Hanjura. “Founder intensity is everything when the ship is becoming bigger. Don’t assume one senior hire will be the catch-all answer.” In many ways, this observation ties back to his opening note on rediscovering oneself: as companies evolve, founders cannot afford to step away from the frontlines of change.

The session closed with a forward-looking conversation on AI, in line with the summit’s larger theme. “Every company will eventually have to become AI-led. AI is a new language, a new currency for operating,” said Hanjura. For Licious, that already includes predicting demand at the micro-market level, reducing wastage, and personalising assortments. Gupta added that even customer service is being reshaped: “AI told us if our staff gets agitated when a consumer scolds them. Early days, but interesting stuff.” Both stressed augmentation, not replacement. “Human plus AI will create a 10x return,” said Hanjura. “AI is giving us speed—what used to take 15 days, now takes three.”

Across legitimacy battles, pandemic highs, valuation pressures and technological shifts, one theme bound the conversation together: building a company that endures requires not just growth but constant reinvention. For the soonicorn founders and investors gathered in Bengaluru, that was the abiding lesson of the Licious story. As Hanjura put it in closing, “There are very few company assets like Licious available. Because of the fundamental nature of the category, I can see Licious long after Vivek and I are gone.” A reminder that consumer startups that last are those built on persistence, deliberate choices, and the courage to reinvent themselves at every stage.

The ET Soonicorns Summit 2025, India’s largest congregation of soonicorns, returned for its fourth edition to Bengaluru on August 22.

360 ONE is the Presenting Partner of the ET Soonicorns Summit 2025, with Shiv Nadar University as the Ecosystem Partner, Raymond as the Wardrobe Partner, Pi42 as the Gold Partner, Bank of India as the Banking Partner, Tracxn as the Knowledge Partner, and K-Tech Startup Karnataka as the State Partner. The Gifting Partners of the Summit are The Mind & Company, Plum, Clinikally, EM5, and True Elements.