Mr. Sushant Gaur, CEO and Founder at Adeera Packaging
1- Tell us about your journey from Urja Packaging to Adeera Packaging, how you started and the long journey ahead ?
Urja Packaging was my first venture and under it we manufactured a subset of what we do now. It was essentially a training ground for me and the team to learn and develop a deep understanding of how this market works.
Back in 2012, the sustainable take-away bag industry was non-existent in India and we had to lay the ground rules for all players by introducing Selling by weight, standard market SKU, Standard packing size, etc that have now become industry standards.
We got a feel for how big this industry can become with the setting up of organized grocery home delivery players in 2017-18 who not only demanded and paid for standardization but also expected logistics to be managed by us.
Atulya Bhatia, who was the biggest trader of paper bags for grocery home delivery at the time had been working with us for 2 years and we decided to join forces to form Adeera Packaging Pvt Ltd and we shut down the old company.
With Ashish joining us co-founder 2020 he brought a decade worth of experience of working in Fortune 100 companies to us. With his background as an MBA from IIFT, Delhi we forayed into foreign markets and have since exported to 8 countries and counting.
2- How will you describe The Growing Industry of Sustainable Packaging Solutions?
There are 2 different parts of our industry - those who are seeing tremendous growth due to the ban on single-use plastics like paper bags, pulp-molded cutlery, paper cups etc, and those who are already providing sustainable packaging solutions like the carton and corrugation industry.
The ban on SUPs and covid has had a positive effect on the R&D going into the development of sustainable packaging.
In the last 3 years, SOS Paper Bag Machines have started being made in India, there is novel research attributed to Indian scientists (DRDO) being done on compostable plastics.
We have seen many paper mills coming back from near bankruptcy due to their experience leading to technological superiority in the recycling of paper compared to the world.
If I had to use 2 words to describe the growing industry of sustainable packaging solutions, I would call it "Sustainably Resurgent".
3- What are the Business and Expansion plans of your company ?
We believe the future of our industry is in circularity, manufacturing bags using paper from recycling mills and agro-based sources is sustainable in the long term but the cycle of sourcing paper waste, recycling, and exporting to consumer countries is long and wasteful.
With the setting up of recycling mills in consumer countries, we want to start global manufacturing units to feed demand locally.
We are also looking to provide long-term, end to end solutions to the FMCG industry for enabling the replacement of multi-layer plastics with multi-layer paper products and packaging lines that can fill and seal those products.
4- What is the USP of the product and what are the industries you cater to?
"Quality, Service, Relationships" is our mantra which is at the core of all that we do, we can call it our USP and we live by it everyday.
Quality is a hygiene factor, in the disposable industry the usage duration of a bag is usually less than 1 hour and customers need us to fulfill the basic parameters of quality.
Service is key here, our value lies in the fact that our product reaches our customers on time, neither before, nor later all the time, for years at end. Relationships are the reason why we grow with 80% of our business being driven by references as of now.
We cater to grocery, pharmacy, QSR and the retail industry.
5- Apart from business life, what are your hobbies and interests?
I like reading business books and learning from online content on which I spend around 2 hours daily.
6- Kindly brief us about your journey so far?
I started this company after being inspired by the say no to plastic campaigns organized by the environment club at school when I was ten years old.
As a 23 year old when I realized with the oncoming ban on SUPs, this could be a profitable business, I jumped to the jump and switched from a potential career as a professional drummer for a famous rock band to manufacturing. With a turnover of Rs 60 Cr this year, the business has grown by 100% year-on-year since then.
Founded in 2019, Adeera Packaging is one of India’s largest manufacturers of sustainable packaging. We replace around 20 plastic bags per second with environment-friendly packaging and save 17,000 trees per month from being chopped by using recycled or agro-waste-based paper to make bags.
We provide daily deliveries, fast turnaround times of 5-25 days and we also provide solutions through the customization of bags to our customers. Adeera Packaging was formed as a manufacturing company, but over the years we have realised that our value lies in the service that we provide our buyers.
We deliver our product to over 30,000 pin codes in India. The purpose is to make the planet a better place for future generations which we want to achieve by creating a global presence to democratize supplies of environment-friendly packaging.
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