Zappfresh goes cold: Inside its costly push beyond fresh meat
Zappfresh is betting on frozen foods to scale, but the shift demands capital, colder infrastructure—and volumes it has never tested before.
NEW DELHI: Recently listed Zappfresh is preparing to make its boldest bet yet. Barely a month after beating bigger rivals Licious and FreshToHome to the public markets through an SME IPO that was fully subscribed, the Gurugram-based meat brand now wants to push into the far more capital-intensive frozen foods business, including vegetarian products.
It’s an ambitious pivot for a company with just $16 million in funding, especially in a space where deep pockets, cold-chain discipline and patient capital tend to determine who survives. That tension sits at the heart of Zappfresh’s next chapter: the firm wants to grow beyond fresh meat and build a broader frozen portfolio. Doing so, however, demands heavy investment in freezing technology, temperature-controlled storage and automated distribution—areas where far larger competitors have struggled or pulled back.
Frozen ambitions
“Our next area of interest is exploring complementary categories that naturally pair well with our existing products. We’ll be pouring into frozen foods, including vegetarian. We are expanding our product baskets—veg, non-veg, newer recipes, new products," said Deepanshu Manchanda, founder and CEO of Gurugram-based Zappfresh, in an interview with Mint.
Manchanda did not disclose specific investment figures for the frozen-foods expansion.
To support this push, the company is leaning heavily on cold-chain upgrades. Manchanda said Zappfresh, founded in 2015, is investing in IQF, or individually quick freezing, technology that freezes each piece of food separately at extremely low temperatures to preserve texture, moisture and quality after thawing.
They are also adding advanced automation across plants and storage to maintain strict temperature control. “We are currently developing more capacity...we keep investing time and again so that we don’t hit the ceiling on capacity," he added.
By “temperature abuse", he refers to any fluctuation outside the safe temperature range during processing, transport or storage. For instance, when frozen products partially thaw and then re-freeze, or when chilled products rise above the required 0-4°C. Even short spikes can compromise food safety, taste, and shelf life.
Manchanda did not disclose details on Zappfresh’s warehousing and cold-storage capacities, or on the number and mix of frozen SKUs the company plans to roll out.
The timing of this expansion comes as Zappfresh faces formidable competitors with far deeper war chests.
Licious has raised nearly $490 million to date, FreshToHome about $286 million, and quick-commerce players are muscling in with private labels such as Zepto’s Relish. For most instant-delivery platforms, meat has long been a wary category: Zepto only entered it in October 2023, while Blinkit and Swiggy have either avoided or quietly shut down their private-label meat experiments.
Neither Dunzo’s “butcher-to-doorstep" model nor Swiggy’s B2B meat partnerships have cracked the category.
Even so, Zappfresh has shown growth momentum. In the first half of FY26 (six months ended 30 September), revenue from operations rose 43% year-on-year to ₹95.85 crore, from about ₹66.92 crore in H1FY25. The company went public on the BSE SME platform in October, but its ₹60 crore IPO was undersubscribed at just 52%, and the price band had to be revised down to ₹95-100 from ₹96-101.
Larger players like Licious and Captain Fresh, meanwhile, have long flirted with going public but continue to remain on the sidelines. Instead, Licious is pushing deeper into offline retail, a channel that still accounts for the bulk of India’s meat sales, and plans to open 25 stores by the end of this year.
Colder calculus
Zappfresh’s shift towards complementary categories comes at a moment when online meat companies are juggling high operational demands and cold-chain dependencies that leave little room for error.
Frozen vegetarian formats, in contrast, are easier to manage, with lower microbiological risks, simpler food-safety requirements, and more forgiving temperature tolerance.
This reduces quality failures and quality assurance workload compared to frozen raw meat, explains Akshat Gupta, practice leader, Food and Agriculture at Praxis Global Alliance.
Frozen foods in India are growing at 13-14% CAGR, Gupta added, within a frozen meat and ready-to-cook market estimated at roughly ₹10,000 crore. The category is drawing bigger incumbents, too. ITC recently acquired Meatigo and Prasuma in a two-tranche deal worth about ₹187 crore, taking its stake to 62.5% by 2027, Mint reported earlier. The transaction values Prasuma at just under ₹300 crore, slightly more than twice its FY24 revenue.
ITC said the share of modern trade and online channels in its foods business has risen from 17% in FY20 to 31% in FY25. In its Q2FY26 earnings, the company noted that annualised revenue run-rate for its foods portfolio is now at roughly ₹1,100 crore, although it does not disclose sales by individual sub-segments within its non-cigarettes FMCG division.
But for companies built on fresh meat, this expansion into frozen doesn’t come cheap.
“An IQF line ranges somewhere from ₹50 lakh to ₹4-10 crore depending on scale, and cold rooms plus deep-freeze distribution add significant upfront and recurring power and maintenance costs," Gupta explained. Frozen capacity tends to have long payback periods and hinges on steady volume ramp-up.
And that is the strategic bind Zappfresh finds itself in: to grow beyond meat, it must enter a category where scale, capital and sustained throughput dictate survival. Whether a newly listed SME player with limited funding can reach the volumes required for frozen foods to pay off remains the question looming over its next phase.
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