KISHORE KUMAR HEGDE: Owner of Life Line Feeds; Story of Hatch to Health

Inspiration from other Business tycoons :

 In 1985 OM Traders started a poultry distribution with an investment of Rs 50,000.Having started the distributorship he visited the diaries, farms and Poultry farms. He started his own Poultry farm in the year 1987 with 3000 birds for research in feeds and management. This continued till 1995 when he expanded his poultry business to 20,000 birds and set the trend for bulk production of broilers. He developed the habit of reading Business magazines like Business Today and Economics Today magazines and was following the business tycoons like Tata, Azim Premji , N Narayana Murthy and others and wanted to follow in their footsteps and was highly influenced by them.  Though his business was running profitably with a return of 1 ½ lakhs to 2 lakhs, he was restless and wanted to develop his business like others and so in the year 1997 started Nandan brand of cattle and poultry feeds along with Arvind Bhat G M, who was Phd in nutrition. Farmers who were purchasing the feed wanted chicks along with the feed and so they started Hatchery, and breeding. But selling these became difficult during off season and so they came up with Contract farming where they took the full responsibility  of raring and buying , this was first of its kind in Karnataka and it clicked for them and farmers were also benefited by this. And upon recommendation and suggestion from Arvind Bhatt they started online processing and retailing first in Chikmagalur in the year 2002 along with a mini slaughtering plant of 200 birds per hour capacity. In the year 2005 they extended Life line’s Tender Chicken operations  to  Bangalore and other cities. It became a success as it was the first of its kind designer shop for selling chicken where anybody could walk in irrespective of age and gender to buy the chicken without having to face the smell and other dirty surroundings as was the case of chicken shops till then. In the year 2006 they started a state of the art slaughtering facility, with a capacity of 1800 birds per hour at Chikmagalur. In the year 2012-13 they started state of art feed mill 2, rendering plant and German cold storage system with world class technology, with an annual turnover of Rs 165 crores. Kishore Kumar Hegde who travelled to foreign countries extensively was highly influenced by their technology and took it as a challenge to develop the same in our country as well. He upgraded the slaughtering facility to a capacity of 3500 birds per hour at Chikmagalur to meet the demand. 

Best infrastructure in the poultry industry:

All these were achieved in a very systematic and scientific method with world class technology as one of the best in India, with people friendly, and Environment friendly methods of rain harvesting and solar power used. Aim of Mr Hegde was not only making money but he wanted to protect the environment also and not exploiting the natural resources, this in turn led to inventions of many new procedures being followed. He gets the best chicks from Vencobb chicken, of whom he is a franchisee, and rears them in a 10 acres automatic farm with air conditioned and fully automatic facilities which involves less of human involvement and less stress to the birds and they are reared in a very healthy, safe environment. Their breeding farm has a capacity of 1,50,000 breeders, with auto feeding and deep litter system rearing and auto egg collection. This is fully powered by a solar power plant. The growth of the chicken is so clean and healthy that there are not many health issues faced by the poultry and they are fed with a very highly nutritious feed from their own plant and are devoid of steroids or any chemicals. Their feed is enriched with vitamins and as a result the chicks are of very high quality. 

They supply their chicken to not only the local market but also to Best of best hotels in Karnataka, to the international airlines, West Bengal, Delhi Mumbai, Kerala, Goa and even to Bhutan Military services from last one year. All these are due to the quality that they deliver. This has resulted in a turnover of 350 Crores  which speaks for itself for their success. Theirs is the only company to have secured Quality certificates in all the 7 areas of production. They incurred a loss of around 34 crores during Covid lockdown. 

Humanitarian:

Kishore Kumar Hegde is not only a good businessman but he is a genuine human being as well he sets aside a percentage of his profit for charity purpose. In Fact he has adopted 150 children till now out of which 30 are doctors, many are engineers , Phd holders and post graduates. There are 1200 direct employees and indirectly there are 5000 to 6000 involved in his business. He gives opportunities for the non graduates to own a truck and their by help them in their livelihood as well. He believes in growing and letting others to grow with him. Hence he is rightly lauded as a gem of a person and a Humanitarian. His wife and his two sons are helping him in this venture whole heartedly . He plans to build the best infrastructure with an investment of another 500 crores in the future and to develop methods of exploiting less natural resources , a true humanitarian indeed.

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