For over 8 years we have been growing a wide range of European vegetables like iceberg lettuce, snow peas, sugar snap peas, runner beans, red cabbage, baby corn, parsley, cherry tomatoes, broccoli, chinese cabbage, celery, zucchini, yellow squash, leeks, chinese pak choy, chinese pai tsai, swiss chard, sweet yellow corn, artichokes, leaf lettuce, romaine/cos lettuce, basil, sage, thyme, rosemary and sweet marjoram. We grow all our vegetables in our own farms.
Our farms are located in a green belt in Talegaon at a height of 2000 ft above sea level, in Pune district 144 km or a 3 hour truck drive from Bombay international airport which has excellent air connections to all major international airports. Presently, we have 78 acres under cultivation. We grow vegetables on raised beds using the latest techniques of drip irrigation and micro sprinklers, with mulching. This, of course, ensures reliability of growth and quality. This also ensures that our vegetables do not have any contact with the soil or irrigation water. We import all our seeds from reputed suppliers in the U.S.A, The Netherlands, the UK, and Taiwan.
In 1996-97 we exported 32 tons of snow peas to Australia during the November-February period. We will be exporting over 60 tons of snow peas to Australia, UK and Dubai again in 1997-98. We are also supplying 10 tons of iceberg lettuce a month to McDonald's India, for their Indian operations. We have also been appointed as sole vegetable suppliers in India for the Thank God It's Friday's chain of restaurants and supply them over 2 tons a week of 28 different European vegetables. We are supplying our vegetables to all 5 star hotels, restaurants, clubs, flight kitchens and offshore catering companies in India. We airfreight our vegetables to Delhi, Madras, Bangalore and Ahmedabad. We do, of course, market our vegetables under our own brand in Bombay through 35 retail outlets.
Our post harvest facilities have a cold chain consisting of a pre-cooling room to remove field heat; a large cold room and a refrigerated van where the temperature and the relative humidity of the vegetables will be maintained between 1 degrees to 4 degrees Celsius and 95%, respectively. The pre-cooling room ensures that the temperature at the core of the vegetable will be at 2 deg. within 90 minutes. Our vegetables are in the pre-cooling room within half an hour of harvesting. Our pack house, pre-cooling and cold room are located on our farm; this ensures that there is no delay between harvesting, packing, pre-cooling and cold storage. All our refrigeration equipment like the air handling systems etc. is imported from BIE Refrigeration, UK and Thermoking, Ireland. I'd like to reiterate again that we are not traders. We grow all these vegetables on our farm.
We also practice rigorous grading of all produce to the standards required by individual countries. As we also have a large local market, we sell the B and C grade material locally. Regarding packaging, we can assure you that our quality will be comparable to any quality available internationally. The carton in which we are supplying our snow peas to Australia was received well by the supermarket and hotel clients of my Australian importer. We are confident of meeting with your requirement of packaging. We could also pack our vegetables in punnets or ready-to-serve plastic trays with anti-fog cling film.
If you need any further information about us or information on our vegetables, seasons, availability, prices etc., please do not hesitate to contact us.
The founder of the company is Mr. Ravi Gupta. It was his persistence and passion that has made Trikaya Agriculture reach where it is today.
And here are some snaps of some of our 250 strong team.
You can contact Samar Gupta at samar@vsnl.com