Sunstar Overseas Limited

Sunstar Overseas Limited was officially founded in 1995 by two relatives, Naresh and Rakesh Aggarwal, but its origins predate this by a number of years. The Aggarwal family, current owners of Sunstar, previously owned a partnership firm called Star Overseas. Mindful that limited liability firms have a significantly easier time getting loans, the family decided to restructure the business. It remains family-owned, with the Aggarwals dominating the upper levels of management and industry professionals overseeing operational divisions.

The company’s first rice mill was built near Delhi in 1995, and the company has since expanded their facilities considerably. In 1999 and 2000, at the insistence of a major European buyer, Sunstar developed in-house product traceability from farm to mill. It also installed information systems, which they call enterprise resource planning (ERP), to coordinate all the firm’s resources, information, and activities. Investing in modern machinery and facilities became a priority, spurred by the exacting requirements of foreign buyers.

When Sunstar decided to enter the organic market in 2000, the managers initially approached farmers with large land holdings in the Haryana and Tarai belt of Uttaranchal state. However, these growers, already successful, were uninterested in what they regarded as a risky conversion to organic production. After a year of discussions that went nowhere, Sunstar leadership turned instead to the vast numbers of small-scale, resource-poor, marginalized farmers, such as those in the Khaddar area near Haridwar. “Here we found farmers who were already doing organic production of basmati rice by default,” says Ajay. “We just needed to help them organize and provide them with the right agronomic practices.”

With the help of FLO, the Sunstar Federation was established in 2001, “to help small farmers get their due returns,” according to a promotional video. In that first year 85 farmers joined. By 2003, the project received FLO certification. Over the next several years 1,800 farmer- members in 100 villages joined and collectively produced over 8,500 metric tons for Sunstar. Today, that number has reached 3,000 farmers with over 2,000 hectares under organic basmati cultivation. In September 2008, the president of the Khaddar area farmers’ federation and the agricultural head of Sunstar were invited to Switzerland to present their success story to the FLO as part of “Fairtrade Fortnight.”

Since then, Sunstar has obtained national and international certificates for food quality, food safety and process management, including Fairtrade (certified by FLO), organic (certified by ECOCERT USA), Kosher (certified by Orthodox Union), ISO (International Organization for Standardization) 9001 (obtained in 2000), ISO 14001 (obtained in 2004), and ISO 22000. They also hold HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points), IPQC (In-Process Quality Control), and APEDA (Indian Agriculture and Processed Food Production Export Development Authority) designations.