According to Manish Behl of Brain Cloud India, the onion market is quite good at the moment, with a satisfactory demand for exports; a circumstance that the company has been able to take advantage of. “We have recently opened a new plant for mechanical sorting, which is currently handling between 10 and 20 tons per hour, and we are now seeing plenty of demand from Malaysia, the Middle East, the UK, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, where they have a preference for high pungency red onions.”
Behl has been in the horticultural business for about 25 years, explains that onions are, in fact, a new product for Brain Cloud. One of the motivations for the firm to get into the sector was that last year, the onion production was not good in India and this sparked an initiative from the government to grow more onions. They´ve conducted a number of studies to figure out what season we should come in, what quality we should produce and what kind of plants we should grow.”
Some of Brain Cloud’s advantages are its capacity to increase the volumes it handles, were demand to increase, and the fact that it is based at the heart of India’s onion production area. “We are consequently supporting local growers and helping them export their production to faraway destinations (and anywhere in the domestic market), with no payment risks for them.”
While profitability is also important, “The main goals for the company are not just to deliver a great quality product (quality which, by the way, has improved thanks to the current mechanisation), but also to build a good relationship with those looking for long-term partnerships,” he concludes.
