What Country Delight has done right in dairy

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Editor's note: The venture capital investor still regrets it. It has been four years since he looked at Country Delight, met its founders, tried the products and went through its financials. But at the time, he couldn’t invest in the dairy startup that is known for its farm fresh milk delivery and that was last valued at $615 million in May this year. “It was such a miss,” he says over a phone call.  It is not often that you hear a venture investor pine over a foregone opportunity that is not a tech startup in a hot sector. In this case, it seems he may have good reasons for his regret. Country Delight has been around for more than a decade now. The Gurugram-based company is essentially a subscription-based direct-to-consumer dairy brand—though it’s expanded more recently to delivering staples such as bread and fresh produce along with milk in the morning. It owns everything from its app to logistics to sourcing relationships with local farmers, and after years building a reputation as a premium milk brand in Delhi-NCR, has mushroomed in …