Milkbasket forays into in-hand delivery service

India’s largest daily grocery delivery service is launching its In-Hand delivery service for fresh meats. Milkbasket is entering this category after successfully offering 9000+ products across FMCG, Dairy, Fruits & Vegetables and all household essentials.

Anant Goel, CEO and Co-Founder, Milkbasket, said, “It has been a phenomenal response from our customers and we are doing over 1000 orders a day (the highest from any meat brand in Gurgaon) within 2 weeks of launch. We shall soon launch in-hand delivery of fresh meats in 7 other cities with our own private label.”

This will be Milkbasket’s first attended delivery service as all its exiting 75,000+ daily deliveries are contactless. Besides delivering freshness and convenience, the service is launched with a nominal delivery charge rate of Rs 9 per delivery and no minimum order, while the rest of the competition is charging Rs 70 per delivery and/or a minimum order of Rs 800.

“This is the first of many other products/ services that we have in our plans for the next year. The idea is to provide unmatched convenience and quality to all our existing 200,000+ families and many more. For a business these are new and high margin revenue streams and are in sync with our aim to achieve profitability in 2020,” Goel added.

Currently, Milkbasket operates in Gurgaon, Ghaziabad, Noida, Delhi, and Bangalore. It is the only full-stack supply chain model in daily grocery delivery where the company owns the end-to-end customer experience.

With less than 25% of their sales coming from Milk and having Fruits & vegetables as the second-largest category by sales, Milkbasket has truly established itself as a ‘neighborhood convenience store’ that gives its consumers unmatched assortment, quality, and convenience, daily.

Emergence of the organised grocery market

In India, the grocery industry, until recently, has been highly fragmented, unorganised, and predominantly small and family-owned businesses due to poor access to capital, technology and regulations. With changing scenarios such as demographics, high economic growth and increasing incomes, the proliferation of brands, consumer awareness, etc, are boosting the organised grocery market.

The emergence of grocery chains such as BigBazaar, More Megastore and others have successfully paved their way into the industry and are rapidly becoming customers’ favourite due to their cost-effectiveness. Globally, India is the sixth-largest grocery market and has a humongous potential for growth due to the rising population as well as disposable incomes.

The Indian grocery market accounts for 69% of India's total retail market.

What’s Shaping the Market

The grocery market in India has come a long way from the erstwhile Kirana shops to the mega-marts of today. The emergence of larger chains and stores began around 2005 and the sector has since grown to over 4,900 supermarkets and 500 hypermarkets across the country.

The factors responsible for the influx of grocery franchises are the Quality of products, the location of the grocery chain, the price of products at the grocery chain, the product range at the grocery chain, and service at the grocery chain.