The Farm-to-Fork Pitch Has a Problem: Pluckk Makes Two-Thirds of Its Money Through Middlemen

Disintermediation Was the Whole Pitch

The direct-to-consumer produce story has been told the same way for a decade. The traditional chain — farmer to aggregator to wholesaler to regional distributor to retailer — adds a handoff at every step, and every handoff adds time, cost and spoilage. Cut the middlemen out, go farm to doorstep, and the waste collapses along with the price.

It is a good story. India’s Pluckk, which raised ₹100 crore (roughly $10.8 million) from existing investor Euro Gulf Investment and has now taken about $26 million in total, is one of its more visible tellers. But its own numbers describe something considerably more interesting than disintermediation.

Where the Revenue Actually Comes From

Quick commerce accounts for 60–65% of Pluckk’s business. Direct-to-consumer — the channel the entire farm-to-fork framing rests on — contributes 10–15%.

The company reaches 50 cities through integrations with six quick-commerce platforms, Blinkit, Instamart, Zepto and Flipkart Minutes among them. Which is to say: the produce still passes through an intermediary that owns the customer relationship, sets the terms and takes a cut. The intermediary is no longer a mandi wholesaler. It is a ten-minute delivery app.

That is not a failure. Quick commerce is how a large share of urban Indian households now buy fresh food, and meeting demand where it exists beats ideological purity about channel structure. But it is a materially different business from the one the marketing describes, and it carries a different risk: a supplier earning two-thirds of its revenue through six platforms it does not control has concentration exposure, not independence.

The Economics Are Not Solved Yet

For the financial year ending March 2025, Pluckk reported revenue of ₹85 crore — roughly double the prior year — while losses widened to ₹55 crore from ₹41 crore in FY24. It serviced around three million orders a month and reached ten million households in 2025-26.

Read those two lines together. Revenue doubled and losses grew by a third. Growth is real and it is being bought. That pattern is familiar from every delivery-adjacent category, and it resolves one of two ways: either unit economics improve as density rises, or the funding environment tightens first. The new capital is earmarked for offline retail, tier-II expansion and international markets — three simultaneous bets, none of them cheap.

The Constraint Nobody Can Software Their Way Around

Here is the part that makes Indian fresh produce genuinely hard, and it is physical rather than digital.

Estimates of India’s post-harvest losses vary enormously by source and commodity. The FAO and NITI Aayog have put losses for highly perishable fruit and vegetables at 30–40%, while more conservative recent assessments land at 6–15%. That spread is itself the story: the country does not have reliable measurement of how much of its produce it loses. What is less disputed is the value — India is estimated to lose over ₹92,000 crore of agricultural produce a year to inadequate cold storage, broken temperature-controlled transport and missing post-harvest processing.

The infrastructure gap behind it is structural:

• Access. More than 70% of farmers have no cold storage within 50 km of their farm.
• Concentration. Roughly 60% of India’s cold storage capacity sits in just four states, so “national” capacity figures overstate reach badly.
• Operating cost. Indian cold storage runs at over $60 per cubic metre per year against under $30 in Western markets, with energy at about 28% of total expenses versus roughly 10%.

That last number is the one to sit with. A cold chain in India costs about twice as much to run as one in a market with reliable, cheaper power — and energy is nearly a third of the bill. Route optimisation and demand forecasting help at the margins. They do not change the price of refrigeration.

What Would Actually Signal Success

The technology story here is real but smaller than advertised. Direct sourcing genuinely removes handoffs. Smaller, denser distribution hubs genuinely cut time-to-shelf. Neither builds cold storage near the 70% of farmers who lack it, and neither makes Indian electricity cheaper.

If you are tracking this sector, three numbers matter more than any funding announcement:

• The D2C share of revenue. If disintermediation is working, that 10–15% should climb. If it stays flat while quick commerce grows, the company is a supplier to delivery apps — a fine business, just not the one being pitched.
• Loss per order, not revenue growth. Doubling revenue while losses widen is a spend decision, not a milestone.
• Owned cold chain capacity. Whether these companies build refrigeration or merely rent slots in someone else’s is the difference between fixing the constraint and routing around it.

The farm-to-fork revolution may well arrive. But it will show up as concrete, compressors and power contracts long before it shows up as an app.