Fully owned by Container Corporation of India (Concor), Fresh and Healthy Enterprises Ltd (FHEL) is a first of its kind initiative in India, which aims to provide complete cold chain logistics for fruits and vegetables — from farm to retailer. Incorporated in 2006, FHEL is drawing its expansion plans after tasting success with its pilot project, says Concor managing director Rakesh Mehrotra in an interview with Smita Aggarwal

• After having set up the first Controlled Atmosphere (CA) facility at Rai, how do you intend to extend the cold chain solutions network across the country?

The expansion is part of the present project itself, where we would like to set up a network of such facilities (CA) all over India. We will be covering almost every state. We have plans for about 13-14 such facilities, maybe of smaller size, maybe not all for 1,000 tonnes, depending upon the types of fruits available. Next year, we aim to fully utilise the current capacity (12,000 tonnes at Rai) along with diversifying into other fruits like pears, cherries and mangoes.

• Initially for the pilot project to establish the Rai-HP cold chain, Concor invested Rs 100 crore. What kind of investment is FEHL envisaging for fuelling its expansion and diversifying its current fruit basket?

This is the first project and the idea was to run a single facility first, run it for about a year, see what the processes are that need to be debugged or refined, ahead of a pan-India network. We will review the current operations by the middle of 2008. The investments will depend on the size of CA stores to be set up and other infrastructure facilities. It will roughly be of the order of Rs 1,000 crore-1,500 crore, depending on the size of operations that we envisage.

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