With interest for the online grocery segment growing and several players in India including Amazon, Flipkart, BigBasket, Swiggy betting big on it, the next avenue for growth for these startups seems to be milk delivery, according to an Economic Times report.
For Swiggy, this would be a diversification from its core business, but may ultimately converge with the customer base it has already created. BigBasket too wants to enter this business.
Both Swiggy and BigBasket, which recently have received funding are now eyeing milk delivery startups for acquisitions.
Both the companies are in talks with some of the milk delivery startups in different cities to either work together or to simply take over their existing business. RainCan operating in Pune, Milk Basket of Gurugram and Bengaluru-based Daily Ninja are some of the names being suggested. These companies have a subscription-based model where they deliver milk to the doorsteps of their customers, a more sophisticated job of the good-old milkman.
These are startups and handle between 5,000 and 25,000 orders each day. In some of their cases, it might even be a win-win situation for both sides since these milk suppliers can add groceries to their offerings and companies like BigBasket can quickly add a big chunk of households to be recruited directly for their grocery supplies. Experts do feel this model can work well in quickly expanding the base for them.
Come July, the real fight between Flipkart and Amazon in the grocery space will be closely watched by all interested sides, not excluding the customers, who will want to know what is in it for them.
Interestingly both Swiggy and BigBasket are flush with funds. BigBasket raised $300 million in a Series E funding round led by Alibaba in February 2018, while in the same month, Swiggy too, raised Series F funding of $100 million led by Meituan-Dianping.