Industry practice
Yield per tonne and hours of real line utilisation decide everything else
Fruit and vegetable processing, spices, ready-to-eat, frozen and ambient lines. We design the process backwards from those two numbers, then fit machinery to it — which is the opposite of how most Indian food plants get built.
Sector visual
The opportunity, honestly
India wastes a substantial share of its horticultural output for want of processing and cold chain, while packaged food demand compounds in double digits. The capital is available and heavily subsidised; what is scarce is process design discipline, because plants are usually specified by the machinery supplier who profits from over-specification.
Food Processing benchmarks
- ₹4.5 – 8 Cr
- Capex, 2 TPH fruit line
- 52 – 64%
- Realistic first-year OEE
- 35 – 50%
- Grant support available
- +3.2 pts
- Median yield recovered
Excluding land, 2025 prices
Before an improvement programme
On eligible PMKSY / PMFME components
In our operations engagements
Indicative ranges from our own delivered engagements at 2025–26 prices. They are published so you can sanity-check a quotation, not so you can budget a project.
What makes this sector hard
The five things that break food processing projects
Not a risk register. These are the specific failures we have been called in to fix, more than once each.
Seasonal raw material
A mango line runs ten weeks a year. Plants built for a single crop sit idle for nine months — we design complementary crop calendars so the asset earns year-round.
Yield loss nobody measures
Two to five points of yield hide in peeling, blanching, evaporation and rework. At scale that is the entire profit, and it is invisible without a mass balance.
Supplier-led over-specification
Machinery vendors design the plant they want to sell. Independently tendered projects in our portfolio came in a median 11% below the supplier-led alternative.
Food safety as paperwork
An FSSAI licence in a file is not a food safety system. Modern trade, exports and institutional buyers audit the system, and failures cost the listing.
Working capital in the peak
Buying a season's raw material in ten weeks needs a working capital line sized for the peak, not the average. It is the most common cause of a good plant stalling in year one.
Our playbook
How we approach a food processing engagement
- 01
Mass balance first
Every input, output, loss and utility load quantified before a layout is drawn. This single document prevents most of the expensive mistakes we are later asked to fix.
- 02
Multi-crop calendars
Line configurations that switch between two or three crops with acceptable changeover, so fixed cost is spread across more operating weeks.
- 03
Independent machinery tendering
We write the specification, run a three-vendor tender, evaluate on total cost of ownership and negotiate performance guarantees. We accept no supplier commission.
- 04
Food safety as a working system
HACCP, FSSAI schedule-4 or FSSC 22000 implemented as SOPs, records and internal audits that survive an unannounced buyer audit.
- 05
Grant-funded infrastructure
PMFME, PMKSY components and AIF routinely fund 35–50% of eligible infrastructure. Sequenced so eligibility is preserved.
Funding & schemes
What food processing projects can actually claim
Indicative only — eligibility, quantum and windows change with each policy cycle, and sequence matters more than eligibility.
| Scheme | Administering body | Indicative benefit |
|---|---|---|
| PMFME | Ministry of Food Processing Industries | 35% credit-linked capital subsidy up to ₹10 lakh for micro food processing units, plus branding and marketing support for groups. |
| PMKSY — Unit Scheme | Ministry of Food Processing Industries | Grant-in-aid of 35–50% on plant, machinery and technical civil works, subject to scheme ceilings. |
| Agriculture Infrastructure Fund | Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers' Welfare | 3% interest subvention and credit guarantee on loans for post-harvest and processing infrastructure. |
| State food processing policy | State industries / agriculture department | Additional capital subsidy, power tariff concessions and stamp duty exemption, varying by state and district category. |
Services we apply here
The practices that do food processing work
Sector questions
Food Processing: what promoters ask us
₹4.5 – 8 Cr
Capex, 2 TPH fruit line
Excluding land, 2025 prices
Other industry practices
Food Processing practice
Bring us a food processing project
Forty-five minutes with the partner who runs this sector. You will get a view on feasibility, an indicative capital range and an honest read on whether the timing is right.
- Call
- +91 98765 43210
- Response
- Median 5h 40m in business hours