Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

It’s Aayush here for Trade Tricks this week. 

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, carousels were a popular attraction in US amusement parks and boardwalks. All the fun in going round and round and round and round notwithstanding, part of the game was also riders on the outer edge trying to grab rings from a mechanical arm as they passed by. 

Now, most of those rings were steel—grabbing them didn’t really win you anything. 

But grabbing a brass ring, now that was different. 

It could win you great prizes 👆, but getting your hands on it was not easy. You needed deft timing and a hefty dose of luck. A rare and elusive goal, promising ultimate fulfilment when achieved. Achievable by very few. 

For Indian e-commerce, grocery is that brass ring. 

Almost everybody has tried to crack it, and then shut it or rebranded at least a couple of times. Amazon, Flipkart, Zomato, Swiggy, Ola, Meesho, a whole bunch of smaller players. And tried it in every conceivable form, from 15-minute delivery to subscriptions and early morning deliveries to next-day delivery. Online, offline, you name it, they’ve tried it. 

For a while, you could argue that BigBasket held that brass ring. The company built the segment in India and became kind of synonymous with grocery delivery. But this changed with the pandemic, and the rise of competitors like JioMart and Instamart.

So the brass ring is back up for grabs. 

And after multiple half-baked attempts over nearly eight years, it looks like Flipkart has had enough. 

It’s going for the ring. And this time, it’s all-out.

The latest grab

Flipkart’s latest attempt seems to have kicked off with the naming of Smrithi Ravichandran, a Flipkart veteran of ~12 years and widely credited with the successes of its yearly Big Billion Day sales, as its Head of Grocery in February 2021.

Flipkart had already made a few attempts at cracking the segment. First in 2015, when it launched a grocery-ordering app called Nearby to deliver fruits, vegetables, soaps and other staples from supermarkets to customers. 

Then again in early 2019, when it launched another grocery offering called Supermart, and announced plans for FarmerMart, which was meant to sell locally-produced and packaged food products online. It also planned to establish brick-and-mortar grocery stores. 

Well, Nearby shut down just a few months after launch due to a weak consumer response.