With Malaysia being one of many countries that are highly vulnerable to global shocks affecting its food supply chains, both consumers and producers have been hard hit. Often, food consumers have to contend with limitations in supply volume and options, as well as the quality of goods.

On the supplier side, a lack of insight into the volume of demand for certain ingredients arising from market access challenges makes it difficult to plan, and order management and fulfilment are often done manually. Other factors influence these conditions, such as fragmented stakeholder linkages across the supply chain and rudimentary supply and demand monitoring, making it a challenge to see opportunities for optimisation quickly. Efforts to streamline food supply chain processes come at an opportune moment, presenting efficiencies, resource sustainability, and cost savings for both business buyers and farm producers.

One such solution is spearheaded by Secai Marche, a cloud-based farm-to-table B2B platform that links farmers and food businesses by building more economically viable and sustainable operations of small-scale farms as well as F&B retailers, hotels, restaurants, and cafes through improved access to good & delicious food. This is done through streamlining agricultural logistics, realising cost efficiency and product bundling across farmer suppliers that unlock more options for fresh food ingredients, through a process that enables transparency and optimised product value.

Bolstering the food supply chain

Headquartered in Japan with Malaysia as its first global branch, Secai Marche co-founders Ami Sugiyama and Shusaku Hayakawa have had personal experience in food supply chain pain points, running retail food shops and farms themselves for over a decade. In the past four years, they have built the company to address the pain points of scale challenges for farm operations through full-stack tech solutions from online marketplaces, order management, logistics and fulfilment, which also broadens the array of food options and SKUs that are available to hotels, restaurants, and cafes to choose from as their raw ingredients for their food offerings.

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While they started as an online marketplace between food producers and food and beverage retailers, they have since expanded to include order fulfilment as that is what is lacking in current market solutions. Through a marketplace SaaS model, Secai Marche is also the first provider in the region to offer this solution, including cold storage, thereby mitigating food waste challenges in the current supply chain conditions of the region. Their key focus is to enable optimisation, making things efficient for businesses, lessening produce wastage for the farmers, and working with existing warehousing and logistics providers to enable this.

Using technology also generates information that can be used to further optimise the farm-to-table process, realising operational efficiency and greater convenience that benefits farmers, food businesses, and consumers. It also generates positive impacts on sustainability via mitigating the occurrence of food waste. Their data shows that the platform has minimised food loss and waste among their customers’ current supply chain by as much as 75 per cent.

B2B e-commerce for F&B retailers

To address market access and sales channel challenges for farmers, Secai Marche has its B2B online platform where F&B retailers can directly connect with them, much like an online grocery shopping experience for hotels, restaurants, and cafes. It further enables efficiency by providing order management and processing solutions, including streamlining payment collections, thereby addressing multiple collections and variable payment term cycles across buyers.

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The platform also streamlines anticipated market demand, enabling feedback loops for food producers. It streamlines logistics and distribution as well by covering the fulfilment function from farm-to-restaurant through the pick-up goods, quality check, washing of goods, repacking, sorting, picking, and last-mile delivery to restaurants by combining goods with other products and bundling them into one order. Especially for perishables, Secai Marche has been focusing on operational excellence in cold chain facilities to ensure its produce does not lose the required standards — something which many players in the market find challenging to execute.

Through this end-to-end service, restaurants enjoy more product variety and freshness with lesser minimum order quantity requirements, being able to choose products through the online platform, receiving one invoice, and paying everything together, instead of dealing with multiple suppliers and invoices.

Formidable track record

What differentiates Secai Marche is its ability to power a shared supply chain with precision where the delivery needs of various food suppliers can be catered to. To date, they are working with 300 food producers in Japan and Southeast Asia, as well as 400 hotels, restaurants, and cafes, *processing monthly transactions of over USD100,000 (*as of publishing. The current monthly transaction ranges between USD200,000 as of August 2022).

The startup has since raised a total of 2.5M USD from its previous funding rounds to focus on growth by building out its technology stack further, bolstering its talent pool, and expanding its reach to more countries in Southeast Asia. Rakuten is an investor and serves as their strategic partner as well, being the biggest e-commerce company in Japan. Their experience in the field can accelerate Secai Marche’s journey to expansion.

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The Secai Marche team is keen to engage with strategic partners to further accelerate their growth and impact in the markets that they serve, with Singapore as its next target country for expansion, followed by Thailand and Indonesia, and with possibilities of engaging more farmers across the region to source produce.

The startup is also gearing up for its series A raise, expanding its service key units to 3,000 products with transparency in sourcing, serving a growing number of consumers who are more conscious of food product sources. Secai Marche is bullish on its mission to build a better supply chain that connects producers and end users most efficiently, maximising value for them through new direct channels and fulfilment.

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This article is produced by the e27 team, sponsored by Secai Marche

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