India’s popular online grocery store BigBasket initially saw operations come to a standstill when the lockdown was imposed. However, it has managed to scale up operations in recent weeks to 300,000 orders per day, as per its CEO Hari Menon, who spoke at a webinar on “F&B Startups: Striving & Thriving in a COVID World”, which was organized by Fireside Ventures and TiE Delhi.
The CEO explained how, initially, due to confusion on the ground, local authorities asked BigBasket to shut down warehouses. This caused confusion among their workforce, who then decided to leave for their hometowns, leaving the operational capacity halved. Orders were down to 30,000 per day from a normal 250,000 per day.
Hari Menon went on to explain that developing infrastructure capabilities and building a good supply chain and warehouse network in the last 2-3 years paved the way for BigBasket to make a good comeback. As per him, BigBasket faced no issues on their supply side and has now scaled up to 300,000 orders per day. 57 partnerships helped them get more people and scale operations. He also talked about the dynamic running operations at BigBasket, like setting of capacity every morning- depending on the number of people reporting to work.
BigBasket started getting people to buy together, by encouraging neighbours to accumulate orders and place them together. Community selling was introduced and they started delivering groceries to apartment complexes, who put orders together for their residents. This led to an increase in productivity for the delivery systems. They further rationalised their SKUs in cities. Soon, increased government support also helped BigBasket scale its operations. The CEO said that business process re-engineering had been key to increase productivity during the lockdown. BigBasket is also in talks with various potential new startups and may get young emerging brands on their platform soon.
Amidst the pandemic, BigBasket has managed to raise $110 million in April 2020. While many other businesses struggle to make a comeback due to the disrupted supply chains, BigBasket has set a good example of how having a robust supply chain can help during times of a crisis. With social distancing becoming a necessity, many online grocery stores are trying their best to further scale up operations as soon as possible to meet the growing demand.
