Grocery retail is a business like none other in India. It’s got large business houses, multinational behemoths, well-funded startups, and millions of resilient neighbourhood stores. And all of them are scrambling for the opportunity to become the destination of choice for a customer’s weekly or monthly shopping. And in a country of nearly 1.4 billion, that opportunity is a gargantuan one indeed.
The pandemic not only made the $460 billion grocery retail market the centre of attention but also made the offline-online binary seem simplistic.
Urban residents walking to the gates of their apartment complexes to collect their online orders became a common sight during the lockdown.