Zagana’s Order of Business

Zagana’s Order of Business

Sean: We have a question from Nino. How did the agricultural supply chain disruption caused by the pandemic affect your agribusiness?

Jason: And that’s a good question. We started Zagana as traditional e-commerce, we take your order and we deliver it in 3 to 5 days. So when we take the order, we send it to the farm saying “here are the orders” then we’ll send it to our storages then that’s when we distribute it. So that’s what we have been doing for the B2B side – that is how we do it before the pandemic because we were delivering to restaurants. And then when the pandemic happened, because of the lockdown, we changed a lot of our supply chain, so it really disrupted it.

Jason: Our farmers were not able to supply the products we asked from them. And there was also a rise in demand because everyone went online. March 15, we opened up our website. That was our first time opening up our website, and then thousands of our orders came in. But because we’re doing that traditional e-commerce, there was a big number of orders that we sent to the farm, and that made our farmers baffled as some of the products are not yet ready for harvest. So a lot of items are out of stock and need to be replaced, our customers really got mad saying “why are there no products coming from the farm?” and then the delivery trucks that we use to carry out the deliveries to our customers before, they often get delayed because they need to go through a lot of checkpoints.

Jason: Number one, checkpoints. Number two is the waiting time for the customers to go down either from their condo or inside of their subdivision. So one customer will take around 30 to 40 minutes and think about it that one truck usually carries 30 loads of orders. So by the time, it gets to the 30th customer, some of the goods are already spoiled. So eventually we had to pivot our model. Within a month we were able to pivot it to doing that ‘instant commerce.’ So what is instant commerce? It’s bringing the goods to our storage, keeping them there, and then we start taking orders. So the moment they ordered online, either Zagana.com, Grab, Foodpanda, Lazada, Shopee, Pick-a-roo, or Metro mart. They will be able to view the products that are on stock and out of stock. So if it’s out of stock they won’t be able to order. So that made it a painless transaction. So if they order and we have it on-stock, we pick it up, pack it and deliver it within 30 minutes to your house. So revolutionizes how we are shopping now digitally.

Sean: Amazing.

Sean: Now we have another question. What sets it apart? So we know that there are other solutions trying to also go into the same industry, and provide the same service. What sets Zagana apart and how did you formulate your unique selling proposition?

Jason: For us, I will say it’s the 30 minutes delivery. I don’t see any farm-to-table grocery shops that have been doing that and we have the selections, we have selections from high land to low land crops. We have frozen goods like seafood all the way from Capiz, which is the seafood capital of the Philippines. We were able to work closely with the fishermen – what they offer is freshly harvested seafood. Whether it’s scallop, Lapu-Lapu, or milkfish, they blast freeze it so that it will maintain its freshness and we ship it to our storage and from there we deliver it to you. Once you open your package you can really smell its freshness from the sea. We are really proud of the technology that we’re putting into it. We’re studying how we would be able to prolong and maintain the product, and we’re working closely with the Department of Agriculture and UPLB in terms of making sure that we maintain this.