Case: Blends Cooperative Ltd
Introduction
A social entrepreneur is, in essence, someone who develops an innovative answer to a social problem (for instance, a business model for helping to tackle poverty). A decade ago the term was scarcely heard; today everyone from London to Lagos wants to be one.
One such initiative is Blends Cooperative, to work with farmers to produce high quality fresh juice from fruits and vegetables and deliver it at the door step every morning. Although a simple idea, it started with a vision of creating large scale employment and also making juice, like milk, an integral part of every house hold’s early morning diet.
Vision
There is a great need for food processing in a country like India. According to Emerson study in 2013, around 13,300 crores worth of fruits and vegetables are wasted annually in India.
The founders also envision an Amul like business model for Blends, both for juice delivery, and otherwise. Like Amul has become a cooperative success, creating bottom of the pyramid employment along with successfully becoming financially sustainable, there is a definite scope in food processing, for farmers to create a great business idea out of it.
Business Model
Door Service delivery models have had tremendous success in the recent years. Started as a private entity, Blends was set up by MBA graduates a couple of years back to make the busy lives of professionals, women, sportsmen, senior citizens and many others healthy and easy. The company maintains quality, produces cold pressed juice (as opposed to traditional method) and has a good market share in the residential market in Hyderabad.
Presently, the supply of fruits and vegetables is only through the usual market places but the strategic move towards a cooperative was slowly happening. Most of the supply will be direct-farmer based within the next few months. Similar is the involvement of farmers in the business.
Cold Pressed Juice
When you prepare juice at home, you simply extract the juice, pour it in a glass and enjoy it. But what happens is that the blades of your juicer add heat and expose the juice to the air. This results in oxidation and loss of vitamins, enzymes and other important nutrients.
Cold pressed juice, on the other hand, is extracted by pressing fruits and vegetables without any heat. These juices are put into large chambers and a huge amount of pressure is applied to them. This prevents the loss of nutrients, keeping the juice healthy. With proper refrigeration, this will last for 48 hours.
Target Segments & Scalability:
Although residential market looks like a good segment to capture, the founding team always had their eyes on the corporate clients. But they faced some problems convincing the ‘institutional’ clients to their product.
Questions also lingered on scalability, especially considering the cooperative model and the market competition in similar segments.

The Problem Statement 1. Very few social enterprises have scaled up to reach the level of Amul. Identify few bottlenecks in supply chain ‘Blends’ will face if the company wants to scale up and what it can possibly do to avoid it. 2. Is getting into corporate clients a good idea? What customer segments it needs to target to meet both its social goals as well as financial goals. And how do we reach them? 3. How to replicate a cooperative model creating social impact in such a food processing set up?

Ensure that you address the following while developing recommendations for the problem statement. * The proposition and the wow factor * Description of the customer segment * Value proposition to all stake holders * Business model and competitive advantage * Regulatory restrictions to be overcome if any * Pricing Proposal along with assumptions made * Projection of growth * Challenge the status-quo

Your response should be no more than 5 slides. You should present clear understanding of the current state of Blends Cooperative in the first slide. Remaining four slides should address the four parts of the problem statement.
In addition to these 5 slides a) you should include one title slide with team name and email-ids of members and b) you can include up to two “appendix” slides. The appendix slides will be of help to you only in your final presentation.