Saroban startup; A system for marketing, marketing of agricultural products

The Saroban startup connects the farmer to the market and gives him more power to choose who to sell his product to and at what price.
Most of the startups in ecosystem Agricultural businesses have been formed and operated in the agricultural market sector. Although there has been such a focus in recent years, agricultural market failures continue to plague farmers and consumers. From the existence of these inadequacies, it can be concluded that there are still attractive opportunities to create new businesses in this area.
Activity in any industry will have better results when supported by large and experienced companies. So far, there have been few companies that trust startups, but eventually this will happen and news of investment Or we hear about the creation of acceleration centers by large companies. In the field of agriculture, the entry of the large holding of Tashagaran into the field of investment on Startup It is a good and promising news that can be the introduction of other big companies.

Tashagaran Holding is made up of 116 companies, some of which have more than 30 years of experience and have started their activities by building infrastructure such as dams, roads, stadiums, and power plants. Now the field of activity of these companies has expanded and includes the fields of agriculture, oil and gas, commerce, consulting, etc. This holding last year started to create an arm venture capital investment has been operating under the official name of Sepehr Sustainable Development Investment Knowledge-based Company.
The first investment of Tashogaran Holding was made on Road Startup, which operates in the field of transportation. After that and according to the infrastructure, equipment and wide communication network that Tashargaran Holding has in the field of agriculture, it has decided to invest in startups in this field and so far it has invested in the startups of Saroban and Kafe Meuh. According to Dr. Jahanikia, the CEO of Sepehr Sustainable Development Company, according to the existing capacities, the future investments of this company will include the fields of tourism, oil and gas, and construction in addition to agriculture.
As it was mentioned, Saroban is one of the startups that has managed to attract capital from the venture capital arm of Tashagaran Holding. It seems that Saroban will play a central role in the role of this holding in the field of agriculture. Therefore, to learn more about this startup, we had a conversation with Irfan Mirtalebi, the CEO of Saroban and Ali Nouri Moghadam, the product manager of this startup, which we will share below.

What was the purpose of the formation of Saroban?

According to the experiences we had in the field of agriculture, we considered the fundamental difference between the farm price and the consumer price to be an important issue. At first glance, solving this problem may seem simple, but the reality is that we are facing a complex and multifaceted problem that has many stakeholders. The price issue is influenced by various factors such as farmers’ financial situation, input prices, supply and demand management, and waste management.
The main goal of Saroban is market management and commercialization of agricultural products. Our decision was to enter the field of supply and demand management and create a platform to gather and organize the various capacities that have been formed to manage the agricultural market. A part of these capacities are formed in the holding company of Tashagaran and another part are startups that operate in the field of agricultural market.

We are not talking about eliminating intermediaries because every intermediary provides some kind of service. We are looking for the actors to be in their right place. We are not looking to solve the issue of price difference between consumer and producer overnight. Rather, we are looking to first give advice and financial services to the farmer to solve part of this problem. The remaining parts of the problem will be solved with the help of other startups. Saroban is actually the backbone of the platform that startups join to solve this puzzle.

To be more clear, what service does Saroban provide?

Saroban connects the farmer to the market and gives him more power to choose who to sell his produce to and at what price. On the other hand, it is hard to find the product in the market, and Saroban helps the buyers to buy the desired product with good quality and price by providing access to the farmers. Most startups in the field of agriculture cannot get a good relationship with farmers, but we have been able to reduce the resistance of farmers to enter the platform and perform well in terms of the penetration rate and the number of attracted farmers.

How has Saroban performed in terms of audience attraction?

Part of our audience are farmers, currently our database has reached about 26,000 farmers in this category, and 5,000 of them have provided products in the system. On the other side of the platform, anyone who buys agricultural products is considered our audience. Some of the buyers operate as wholesalers, which include factories, processing industries, exporting companies, warehouse owners, and other major buyers. Overall, we are satisfied with our performance in attracting farmers and major buyers. Another part of buyers are fruit sellers. We have prepared a system for this category as well, but due to the spread of Corona, face-to-face consultation became impossible and has now stopped. With the improvement of the situation, we will resume our activities to connect farmers to fruit sellers.

What are your competitors and how do you compete with them?

In the past year, many start-up businesses have entered the agricultural market sector. We have separated them into several categories; Some are engaged in providing the needs related to agriculture, such as fertilizer; Another category sells one or more agricultural products, which usually operate as a b2c. We do not have serious competitors in the b2b space, and the businesses that are active in this category are different from us because we provide marketing, marketing and marketing services, but the rest of the groups have often created platforms for publishing sales ads.
We provide farmers and buyers with market consulting services. We also have the possibility to do marketing operations for them and charge for these services, but our competitors do not provide such services and usually play the role of a big intermediary.

What size do you envision for the entire market of agricultural products?

According to the statistics of 1995, we have more than 4 million farmers in the country, and due to the increase in rainfall in recent years, we will witness the prosperity of agriculture and the increase of this number. Out of these 4 million farmers, we have targeted 1 million people and we plan to interact with 100 thousand farmers in a 2-year period.
The agricultural market is expanding. We also have this feedback that day by day we encounter more modern farmers who are willing to use new market tools, so we think that the goals we have drawn are achievable.

What awareness has been created by the information you have about the market?

In addition to the communication we establish with the farmers, we receive the information about the products and capacities cultivated in the farmer’s place of residence and register them in the Rustaban system. Based on this, we created a model of product analysis in Saroban so that we can monitor which products are available in which part of the country and at what time of the year.
Since we interact directly with the farmer, we have collected information such as the area of ​​the land, the volume of production, the products he grows, etc., and the accumulation of this information, while helping to understand the market and make decisions about our own business, can also create opportunities to generate income. .

What path will Saroban take in the next six months?

Until today, we focused more on communicating with farmers, and considering that we have reached an acceptable growth in this field, we have decided to have representatives in different cities to maintain and expand the communication network. Our most important goal is to enter the market of fruit sellers, which will be realized by launching the relevant system. The feature of this system is that the fruit seller orders his product daily and exactly according to his needs. We have negotiated with large stores such as Refah Store to be the supplier of chain stores in the field of fruits and vegetables. In the field of localities, we are also planning to create a system similar to the traditional fruit and vegetable distribution vans in order to periodically supply the products to localities. We will test this issue next month. At Saroban, we believe that by focusing on agricultural products market management, we will make the agricultural industry more profitable and its development sustainable.