GO GREEN WAREHOUSES

SETTING NEW STANDARDS IN THE WAREHOUSING DOMAIN WITH TECH-DRIVEN SOLUTIONS

The Indian agri-warehousing sector is flourishing with the government actively incentivising private investments in warehousing. Inclusion of Agri warehousing under priority sector lending,m subsidy schemes, tax sops, and the Warehousing Act have gone a long way in promoting the sector.

Business Connect has been a great appreciator of companies that sets new examples in the corporate world with their innovative solutions. We have a fabulous history of featuring various leading business ventures and their inspiring leadership-and here again we are back with another exclusive edition of our magazine that is devoted to inspiring the world with the success tale of leading companies in the market. Our editorial team had an interesting and joyful session with the leadership panel of Go Green Warehouses.

Co-founder and Executive Director of the company, Santosh Sahu shared a glimpse of the company portfolio and revealed some untold facts about his entrepreneurial journey so far. We truly hope and desire that this fascinating read will add some extra value to the lives of our global readerships and will encourage them to break the barriers and chase their dreams.

COMPANY PORTFOLIO
Introducing us to the unique business model of the company, Santosh asserts, “We solve the prime issues of our clients from farm to fork sector. So, basically, on one hand, it is serving the farmers, who are the producers of the grains, and then on the side, it also looks into the consumer’s side like retail and processor and exporter and importer, etc., who are end-users of commodities.

Go Green is offering services agro warehousing, commodity-backed financing facilitation through banks and NBFCs, quality essaying and certification, storage Inspection and audit services whatever asset management is required from farm to fork. We are trying to get up to entire services under one roof for the Agri value chain.

Moreover, Santosh has been initially working with Godrej Aaadhaar, Reliance Retail, and Spencer’s Retail, which is on the consumer side. So, initially, he spent around 10 years in that sector and then worked in Warehousing & logistics domain for the next 10 years before starting Gogreen. So, Maulik Bhai Shah has registered this company in 2012, and he met me in 2018 to discuss co-founding the venture to enter into the Agri Warehousing space, and the idea of this venture popped up. I truly believe that it is a leader who has to take a lot of pain to motivate the employees to keep the business successful.

We thought trust and transparency is the key area which was missing in the Industry and let us make the Organization around the problem by being a trustworthy and reliable service provider in the space. We kicked started the process in that year 2018 itself and initially, we planned to confine ourselves to some specific geography of the country, but the Customers have shown tremendous response to the new venture and now we are there in 25 states. At present, we are operating in more than 400+ locations and with more than 3500 clients.”

In addition, if we talk about the mission and vision behind this super-growing venture, the company heads forward with a prime vision to be the largest supporter of the farmers and the number one in the agri warehousing space in India. Through their creative solutions, the Go Green team is working to increase the reach of farmers as well as FPOs to source the best quality products and simultaneously trying to increase the number of buyer’s connections to their warehouse to create market linkage of agro products.

EDGE OVER OTHERS
“The secret of the market is very basic, if you see the Indian market is very big. I don’t think competition is there, it’s time to see the opportunity to take and excel on our own. So, it is in the mind itself. In India, 300 million metric ton of production of food grain is there and we have only 130 metric tons of agri warehouse is there. So, I think if you focus on yourself and your team then there is a clear path to growth in the same way.

As far as Warehouse receipt finance, the latent potential is more than Rs. 2 Lakh Cr where as all WSPs put together are not able to reach to Rs. 50,000 Cr mark also in any of the previous years. So the potential is huge. I don’t think competition is there it is only how you manage your team as well as underlying assets well to grow smoothly that is very important.”-Santosh says.

BOND WITH TECH
Santosh says, “Technology is very much essential because we are operating 1200+ warehouses and we do spread across 25 states with more than Rs. 8000 crore worth of value of commodities in our warehouses in India. Here comes the importance of technology to manage such big volume of business with real time information and transaction at every place of your supply chain network. So, there are three aspects in the business – number one, we are responsible for a quality and quantity of the goods, we are managing agri commodities, it is not just like non-agro or any FMCG good, which varies in quality and quantity bag to bag and grain to grain.

The quality of the grains is very important as these are live entity where grains have an embryo which continuously respires and is live. So if you are not opening the warehouse on daily basis, then the grains quality will deteriorate to have huge losses in terms of value of the commodity. So, we try to follow through our automatic monitoring system. We are monitoring the opening and closing of warehouses on daily basis to ensure the grains are OK and also monitoring security system via central control room with CCTV surveillance. We have also got AI/ML based Quality assaying instrument for fast results which can give you results instantly within 30 seconds earlier.”

TRANSFORMING THE WORLD OF WAREHOUSING AND LOGISTICS UNDER ONE ROOF
We asked the team to explain their role in assisting the logistics arena, the ED affirms, “We are trying to make a lot of people aware of warehousing-based businesses. Because a warehouse is not a warehouse for business, but it’s a place where everybody is connected starting from farmers to aggregators to processors and exporters. So, somebody has to have a warehouse to store the goods so that they’re trying to convert their commodities into asset class through this warehousing to get finance against it-and then they are doing spread and they are maximizing the return.