Crop research start-up plans commercial foray

Vijayawada-based BR KuKing Spray, incubated at the Agri-Business Incubator (ABI) of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (Icrisat), Hyderabad, is planning to commercially roll out its cooking oil spray technology by mid-January 2012.
After four years of development including formulation, process and machinery with an investment of Rs 4 crore, BR KuKing recently received an approval from the Food Safety Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) for its cooking oil spray technology (sunflower and groundnut) and the patented and FDA-compliant product has been granted a licence as a proprietary food.
“Our pilot plant is presently running at Pamarru, 40 kilometre from Vijayawada. We are in the process of setting up a commercial plant, initially with a capacity to make 5,000 dispensing cans (each costing Rs 150 for 250 ml) per day, besides exporting our technology to east European and West Asian countries beginning next year,” said managing director B Rami Reddy.
He was speaking to Business Standard on the sidelines of the Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s Food 360-degree, a two-day international conference-cum-exhibition on agribusiness and food processing which began here on Monday. BR KuKing, in which Icrisat holds close to 28 per cent stake, is in talks with a couple of venture capital firms to raise about Rs 6 crore to fuel its marketing and brand-building exercise for its product across major cities down south.
Cooking oil spray, a mechanism for dispensing formulated cooking oil in an aerosol form, helps in reducing the viscosity of oil and providing it with non-stick properties. This technology, Reddy said, will help in uniform spreading of oil in pans or other cooking surfaces, thereby reducing the consumption of oil by 10-15 times as against the regular oil.
In the domestic cooking oil spray market, which at present has only a handful of players like the US-based SprayLite and Agro Tech Foods’ SundropSlimLife, BR KuKing is primarily looking at tapping into the health sector like dieticians, heart specialists and diabetics.
“Once the venture captial fund is in place in the next two months, we will launch the off-the-shelf product. We have already developed products based on coconut and ghee, for which we are planning to file for global patents by the end of this month,” Reddy said, adding the company was in negotiation with all the top three players in the edible oil market in the country for technology licencing and custom-manufacturing, which is expected to crystallise by March 2012.