E-commerce giant Amazon will start selling local grocery produce online through its wholly owned subsidiary in India from March, reports The Economic Times. Amazon has committed $500 million investment in food retail, the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) approved Amazon’s plans to stock and sell local grocery produce online in April, 2017.
Amazon operates its grocery service online via Amazon Pantry, a service which delivers household items and grocery with presence in 34 cities . On the other hand, the grocery delivery service KiranaNow (Amazon Now), which was launched in Bengaluru last year, is currently available in Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad.
MediaNama has reached out to Amazon for confirmation and further details. We will update the post as soon as we hear back from them.
Along with Amazon, online grocers BigBasket and Grofers too has recieved government’s approval last year to retail food products manufactured and produced in India. However, none of the players has started selling locally made food products as of now.
Online Grocery segement
Besides this, Flipkart is giving onlince grocery selling a second try with ‘Supermart’ in Bangalore. It had shut down its earlier service Flipkart Nearby in February 2016, nearly 5 months after its launch.
In a separate development, Online classified service Quikr is also experimenting online grocery business. However, Quickr’s spokesperson said that the company is experiment this and is still unsure whether it is going to enter online grocery space or not.
In October 2017, Bangalore-based BigBasket raised Rs 32.65 crore from Helion Venture Partners, which was immediately it raised Rs 5.5 Crore from its existing investor Trifecta Capital in the same month. And at the same time, Grofers too raised funding of Rs 96 crore from its Singapore-based parent company Grofers International.
