Arya.ag, which describes itself as India's largest grain commerce platform, is moving into apples, AgroSpectrum reports. Starting this season it will bring grading, storage, finance and trading to the apple belts of Kinnaur, Narkanda, Rohru, Kotkhai and Jubbal in Himachal Pradesh, working with growers, farmer producer organisations and local aggregators to move graded fruit into organised markets in Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and Punjab.
Fruit will be assessed at pack houses close to the orchards with AI-enabled scanners that sort apples by colour, size and surface defects and create a digital quality record for each lot. Graded lots go into controlled-atmosphere (CA) storage, under managed temperature and humidity, insured and tracked through digital warehouse receipts, and are then sold through the year to retailers, e-commerce platforms, processors and institutional buyers.
The company will also lend against the stored fruit. Each loan is tied to a specific lot with its quality record, warehouse receipt and CA chamber, the method it uses for grain, so growers can be paid on time and registered traders and processors can buy without tying up all their working capital at harvest. Formal credit exists in parts of the apple cycle, the company says, but lending against objectively graded, insured, stored fruit has been rare. Because a CA chamber cannot be resealed once opened, stock will be released in chamber-sized lots scheduled against buyers' demand.
Himachal's harvest runs from July to November, and growers often sell quickly through mandis and wait weeks for payment; from December to June, buyers rely on stored apples or imports. The 2026 crop is forecast at 4.36 lakh tonnes, nearly 40% below 2025, after poor snowfall and inadequate winter chilling, which threatens off-season supply.
"A grain bag can wait a week for a decision. A box of Royal Delicious cannot," said co-founder and chief executive Prasanna Rao. Apples follow chillies and onions in the company's horticulture portfolio, and the new perishables business is led by Nitin Kumar Lal Srivastava. The first season will focus on domestic demand.
Photo: Sumita Roy Dutta / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Source: AgroSpectrum
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