Fruit pack house with pre-cooling and cold storage

This is a shared pack house near the orchards. Fruit from the field is washed, sorted by size and quality, cooled quickly to remove field heat (pre-cooling), packed in export-grade boxes and held in cold rooms until sold. You earn fees from farmer groups and trading firms, and can also trade fruit yourself.

NABARD's 2023-24 credit plan for Pune lists poor handling after harvest and too few cold stores and refrigerated vans for fruits, flowers and vegetables among the district's gaps. It puts storage facilities at Rs 273.66 crore of credit potential and export credit at Rs 408 crore, and names Purandar fig, pomegranate, custard apple and Junnar mango for export support. The Mumbai-Pune Expressway gives a quick road link to Mumbai.

You need land with good road access and power, pre-cooling units, cold rooms, a sorting and grading line, a backup generator and staff trained in food safety. Export pack houses need registration and regular inspection by plant quarantine and export authorities. The hard part is keeping the plant busy: each fruit has a short season, so line up several crops across the year. Power bills are heavy.

Sign supply deals with the farmer producer organisations NABARD has promoted in Junnar, Ambegaon, Shirur and Indapur, and sell to export firms, Mumbai wholesale markets and supermarket chains.