KOCHI; If you thought they are behind in latching on to technology, you are mistaken. Nowadays fishermen too use an app to sell their catch on small and big harbours, courtesy a start-up venture by two Keralites to supply fresh fish to home. Fresh to home has developed the app in a first of its kind initiative. To use the app, the fishermen need not know English. “They can identify the fish by the photo of the fish genre displayed on the app. All they have to do is to enter the quantity of the fish they want to sell and the price at which they wish to sell. The app will assess the price in comparison to the price offered at other harbours and also the historical price that has emerged from previous entries on recent days and if it is an acceptable price for fresh to home, the green light will flash and if not acceptable, then the red light will become bright,” said Mr Mathew Joseph, chief operating officer of fresh to home.
“Last week Mangalore harbor quoted the lowest price for a variety of fish in bulk quantity because of which the other higher prices quoted by fishermen elsewhere were rejected. But fishermen have the option to sell their fish to other sellers and they do so. On other occasions they get better price with fresh to home,” said Mathew. “We stumbled on the idea after we identified that that fishermen are smart at operating Whatsapp. We then gave training to nearly 200 fishermen for a week in our app. Now the app is being used in 75 out of the 125 mini and other harbours from where we take fish. Our staff are there on each harbour to take delivery also. The auction process starts from 4 am.
“It benefits freshtohome.com’s customer base by providing them the cheapest price and best quality fish,” Mr Mathew said. Mathew said that the use of technology and robust supply network enabled the company to rope in global names Mark Pincus, co- founder of NASDAQ listed social gaming company Zynga and David Krane, the original investor to Uber, Google ventures CEO David Krane, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Pete Briger and Walter Kortschak, among others, to invest in fresh to home.
