BigBasket, the online grocery retail startup has disclosed its plans to sew up its supply chain and back-end ecosystem and will be investing Rs 500 crore for this purpose, reports Mint.
Some of the clear targets set by BigBasket for itself include an ambitious leap in terms of bringing in 5000 farmers into their fold within a year, an increase of almost 200% from the existing strength of 1800 farmers.
Similarly, BigBasket aspires to scale up its customer or user base also from the existing 8 million to 20 million by 2020. The management believes it has been able to take sufficient care of its various functions like prompt deliveries, perfection in stock maintenance and in ensuring that the deliveries are correctly made.
The project to increase the number of farmers making supplies to 5000 is named Farmer Connect. They claim that 85% of the products they are currently selling is already being procured directly from farmers and this will be further looked at and strengthened.
On the end customer front also, BigBasket says it has tie-ups with 2000 kirana stores and bulk customers like hotels and restaurants. They are also operating warehouses in 30 cities which are closer to the farms from where the agricultural products are being procured.
Speaking of the startup’s profitability, BigBasket claims that as standalone operations, Hyderabad and Bangalore are already making profits in the operations. They claim that another couple of months will see three more cities, Kolkata, Chennai and Ahmedabad are also likely to get out of the red. The startup trusts that all the cities where they have operations will break even within 6 months. They believe, with that, more of their resources will be released to grow the organization that has a workforce strength of 16,000.