SupplyNote Success Story: Helping Food & Beverage Businesses Automate Their Supply Chain Entirely

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The global food and beverages market grew from $6,729.54 billion in 2022 to $7,221.73 billion in 2023 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.3%. In businesses specific to the F&B industry, customer service is of the utmost importance. And to offer highly valued services, the F&B industry needs to strengthen its supply chain networks. Thus, there is an upsurge in demand for supply chain management in the F&B industry. Along with advances in technology, the supply chain industry is evolving.

SupplyNote provides a full-stack platform for the entire supply chain management process. It helps Food and beverage businesses with inventory management, vendor management, and logistics supply chain needs.

SupplyNote - Company Highlights

SupplyNote - About
SupplyNote - Industry
SupplyNote - Founders and Team
SupplyNote - Idea and Startup Story
SupplyNote - Name, Tagline, and Logo
SupplyNote - Products and Services
SupplyNote - USP
SupplyNote - Business Model and Revenue Model
SupplyNote - Acquiring Clients
SupplyNote - Challenges Faced
SupplyNote - Growth
SupplyNote - Funding
SupplyNote - Advisors and mentors
SupplyNote - Tools Used in The Company
SupplyNote - Future plans

SupplyNote - About

SupplyNote is a B2B SAAS platform for F&B businesses that provides a platform for end-to-end management of supply chains with an integrated marketplace.

Talking about the long-term vision of the company, its aim is to become the backbone of the F&B supply chain by evolving into a one-stop solution for all supply chain needs – software, service, and marketplace.

In the short term, the idea is to provide a marketplace where merchants can discover suppliers for their raw materials and transact with them, orders from which will be fulfilled by SupplyNote.

SupplyNote - Industry

The global food and beverages market is projected to reach $9,225.37 billion in 2027, experiencing a CAGR of 6.3% from 2023.

The industry has been operating its supply chain using traditional methods (pen and paper) and needs a digital transformation, which SupplyNote intends to bring in. Every F&B outlet suffers noticeable losses due to inventory mismanagement, procurement flaws, etc. For a business that runs on major fixed costs, it becomes more important than ever to maintain the margins. Following the major blow from the pandemic, they observed an accelerated tech disruption in the industry. Therefore, they believe that five years down the line, the industry will be completely digitized in terms of operations.

SupplyNote - Founders and Team

The founding team has Kushang (CEO), Nitin Prakash (CPO), Harshit Mittal (CTO), and Abhishek Verma (COO). They are a bold, intrepid, highly passionate group of tech-loving geeks, foodies, change-makers, doers, and entrepreneurs who are committed to empowering F&B businesses with technology & innovation.

Four friends from IIT Kanpur came together to build SupplyNote, with Kushang leading the idea, Harshit Mittal leading the technological development, Abhishek Verma leading the Business Operations, and Nitin Prakash leading the Product. During the final year, Adcount Technologies Pvt Ltd was incepted (parent company of SupplyNote).

The company currently has a strength of 75, and they believe in flexible work culture. More than the hours spent in the office, they care about making progress toward the goal. They work as hard as they play. They like people who like to take on challenges and ownership, who are competitive and yet they care about nature. Most of the team comprises foodies. And they love sports.

SupplyNote - Idea and Startup Story

SupplyNote was formerly known as Adurcup. AdCount Technologies was originally founded in 2015 by IIT-Kanpur alumni Kushang, Abhishek Verma, Harshit Mittal, and Nitin Prakash with the idea of monetizing paper cups. Over the period, the company built its network of merchants and started dealing in a variety of supplies. The company was using its own software, which was developed in-house, for managing its supply chain, when a client discussed the requirement of such a solution for their inventory management purpose. The team customized the software as per the client’s requirement, and that gave birth to SupplyNote in 2019, a platform that is actively being used across not less than 2000 outlets today.

SupplyNote - Name, Tagline, and Logo

The name itself is made up of two words, Supply-Note, which essentially means noting down the supply. They discovered that inventory management isn’t digitized yet in a major part of the F&B industry in India. As they started the mission of digitizing the supply chain, they came up with the name that means recording the inventory data—SupplyNote, for short.

The logo of SupplyNote might look like an arrow pointing towards the top (that signifies growth), but it’s more than that. That arrow is made up of two letters, S and N, which are the initials of Supply-Note.

The tagline of SupplyNote is 'Fix Your Supply Chain,' enabling companies to expand into new geographies faster by eliminating the hassle of building supply chains or discovering suppliers. SupplyNote has already solved those challenges for them, making it much easier for companies to scale and explore markets. Hence, the logo represents growth—in numbers, in business, in every aspect.

SupplyNote - Products and Services

SupplyNote is an ecosystem of software and services for the management of Supply Chain for F&B businesses. It has 4 products under its umbrella:

1. The Point of Sale Solution: Having an exclusive strategic partnership with Posify, SupplyNote offers its customers a platform for the management of sales, such as billing, kitchen management, table management, rider tracking, web ordering, and more.
2. The Inventory Management / Supply Chain Management Software: Integrated with Point of Sale, SupplyNote IMS takes in the data of sales, and its advanced algorithms break down the sold items into the raw material that has been consumed and updates the inventory in real-time. It also helps with the management of suppliers, the generation of purchase orders, sales orders, and more.
3. The Fulfilment Services: SupplyNote helps merchants and vendors transact with each other without worrying about operational challenges, as SupplyNote offers warehousing and logistic services (dry and cold) to fulfill supply chain needs.
4. The Marketplace: A product of SupplyNote that helps merchants discover suppliers and transact with them, getting more options and flexibility on price, payment terms, quality options, and more.

SupplyNote - USP

SupplyNote is the only full-stack platform for supply chain management, as all the other companies are only solving a part of the supply chain and not the entire supply chain.

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SupplyNote - Business Model and Revenue Model

The clients pay a subscription fee for using the SAAS, while they pay per usage for their fulfillment services. In the marketplace model, they only charge for the fulfillment of delivery (storage and transport) currently and do not charge any commissions from either party.

SupplyNote - Acquiring Clients

Back in 2015 when the company was incepted, the strategy for the acquisition of clients was Feet-on-Street. The team went from door to door, proposing the offerings of the company at that time and built its network of clients. Later, they got great clients who gave us referrals for other clients and word on the streets picked up gradually. Further, in 2019 when SupplyNote was launched, they already were doing business with over 300 clients that showed interest in the software and some of them even turned out to be the first users.

SupplyNote is solving various challenges related to the supply chain and they reach out to every F&B business to discuss the problems they are facing, further contemplating how SupplyNote can solve it for them.

For 100 to 1000, their approach was more linear, with their teammates reaching out to all businesses in the nearby area and pitching them with their propositions. However, as it reached the mark of 1000, they started marketing and taking up branding initiatives, spreading awareness around the significance of digitizing the supply chain, the cost that a good Inventory management software can save, and much more. They are also tying up with companies to provide multiple value propositions to their clients to retain them longer.

SupplyNote - Challenges Faced

One of the earlier products of AdCount Technologies Pvt. Ltd. was Adurcup, an e-commerce platform that was supplying various raw materials to F&B businesses. The challenge was the disorganization of the entire F&B industry at the time, and digitization was yet a foreign concept within the Industry. That is why they decided on solving that challenge, and discovering a bigger opportunity.

SupplyNote - Growth

Since April 2020, the company has grown 12X in GMV and has become the second-largest F&B Supply Chain Company in India (By GMV).

SupplyNote - Funding

SupplyNote has successfully raised a total of $4.7 million in funding across seven rounds from a diverse group of investors. Among the recent investors are Cogniphy and DSP Family Office, and other notable investors include LetsVenture, SucSEED Indovation, Soonicorn Ventures, Venture Catalysts, SOSV, Artesian VC, and more.

Here are the details of SupplyNote's funding rounds:

SupplyNote - Advisors and mentors

Yogesh Bellani, William Bao Bean, Vikram Upadhaya, and Apporv Ranjan Sharma are the mentors and advisors of SupplyNote.

SupplyNote - Tools Used in The Company

They use many tools within the company like- Zira, Asana, and Slack to manage work, and Google Suite for emails, meetings, calendars, docs, slides, and sheets. They use Figma for designing, Hubspot as their CRM, MixPanel, and Google Analytics for data analytics and insights, and more.

SupplyNote - Future plans

They are planning to launch a new kind of marketplace in Delhi NCR which they will be expanding across the country shortly.

FAQs

What is SupplyNote?

SupplyNote is a B2B SAAS platform for Food & Beverage businesses that provides a platform for end-to-end management of the supply chain.

Who is the founder of SupplyNote?

Kushang, Nitin Prakash, Harshit Mittal, and Abhishek Verma are the founders of SupplyNote.

When was SupplyNote founded?

SupplyNote was founded in 2019.

What is AdUrCup?

SupplyNote was formerly known as Adurcup - one of the earlier products of AdCount Technologies Pvt. Ltd.