Milkbasket cofounder Anant Goel launches new startup Sorted with former OLA and OYO executives

Milkbasket’s co-founder and ex-CEO Anant Goel on Wednesday announced the launch of Sorted, India's first omni-channel platform for fruits & vegetables (F&V). This new tech-driven F&V platform has raised over $5 million in its ongoing seed round.

The new F&V platform aims to enable access to quality fruits & vegetables straight from the farmers at a highly competitive price to customers through several mediums like – call, message, online or offline - through a high-density network of Sorted franchisees.

Each co-founder of Sorted comes with over a decade of experience in the start-up world, many of them unicorns. Nitin Gupta (ex-Mb, OLA, Flipkart) and Sahil Madan (ex-Mb, OYO, P&G) have joined hands with Goel as co-founders.

Goel, in a statement, said, “Sorted is not attempting to change the way India buys F&V, it’s plugging the inefficiencies that plague the existing supply chains. We have undertaken multiple POCs over the last 9 months to solve for the known industry issues, especially wastage, while answering for growth and profitability.”

Goel, while highlighting the scope of success for his new venture, further said, "Based on what ‘we now know’ about this space, the existing grocery models shall continue to struggle to solve for F&V as they are created and optimised for selling FMCG - man-made, pre-packed products with a known shelf life, selling in fixed quantities through a static catalogue - none of which is true for F&V.”

Sorted is the first start-up to take a franchisee route of mom & pop stores in this category, where customers still prefer to pick up the product themselves. While Sorted’s proposition for mom & pop stores looks very promising to improve customers' lives, this can also give an extra edge to Sorted over the online players who are selling pre-packed products in closed plastic bags, the company added.

Nitin, said, “With data-first, AI-led forecasting, demand analysis and price benchmarking, we are able to deliver better value to farmers, higher income for mom & pop shops while improving quality and reducing prices for the end customer.”

In an interview to CNBC-TV18 Goel said, "Every problem in agritech starts with wastage and solving wastage and how we can deal with it on wholistic basis. We have primarily three shareholders - first being the farmer. The biggest problem with the farmer is the value realisation for their product and that is what we are solving for the farmer. The second stakeholder is the mom and pop shops. We realise that there are lot of issues that they are facing when it comes to selling fruits and vegetables. So we are working on a full 360 degree view on that. The third stakeholder is the customer where we are looking at ways to get fresh farm produce straight to the customer within few hours of the harvest. So a big plethora of pain areas which we are trying to solve."