INDIA – Grofers, a leading Indian online grocery delivery platform, has rebranded itself as Blinkit to reflect its focus on quick commerce.
Quick commerce as the name suggests, it’s all about speed and generally means consumers can expect delivery within one hour of placing an order.
This kind of online shopping is usually reserved for small orders which consumers need on-demand like a product that they unexpectedly ran out of or an ingredient they need for making dinner.
According to a statement from Grofers, the new name suggests that deliveries will take place in the blink of an eye.
In a blog, Grofers’ CEO and Co-founder Albinder Dhindsa said, “we learnt a lot as Grofers, and all our learnings, our team, and our infrastructure is being repurposed to pivot to something with staggering product-market fit – quick commerce.
Today, we are surging ahead as a new company, and we have a new mission statement – “instant commerce indistinguishable from magic”. And we will no longer be doing this as Grofers – we will be doing it as Blinkit.”
Albinder added that today Grofers has already processed over a million orders a week, across 12 cities in India, “and this is just a start.”
The CEO of Blinkist added that the company is scaling up q-commerce or quick commerce, and it sincerely believes that q-commerce is the future of commerce.
The first part of making q-commerce work for consumers is ensuring 10-minutes delivery, which Albinder said, means a network of riders that are available in every locality in the cities Blinkit serves.
Grofers’ rebranding comes at a time when Zomato, already an investor in the company, will reportedly invest US$500 million to help the e-grocer to bolster its fast delivery.
Meanwhile, Flipkart is strengthening its e-grocery play with a US$145 million investment Ninjacart.
The new funding from Flipkart and its parent company Walmart reportedly values Ninjacart at US$750-800 million from the current US$500 million.
This is the largest investment deal ever made by the Walmart-backed Flipkart and the largest in the country’s agritech space.
Bengaluru-based Ninjacart sources fresh produce from over 100,000 farmers and delivers it to businesses within 12 hours using its network of collection centers, fulfillment centers, and distribution centers.
The investment is expected to strengthen Flipkart’s supply chain for fresh fruits and vegetables— a crucial part of groceries and plays an important role in increasing consumers’ stickiness for online grocery businesses.
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