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The phone has been ringing off the hook st Anushka Noshir Panthaky’s The Greens, an organic food delivery in Mumbai. From about 20 deliveries of organic fruits and vegetables a week, she’s now doing 50 deliveries with her staff of three. The story is similar even for relatively bigger boys like Sahyadri Farms, delivering bulk orders to housing societies in Mumbai, Thane, Nashik and Pune.
“We’d resorted to organic methods like sending WhatsApp messages. A tonne of dormant customers are returning because people are eating at home,” said Shruti Jain, cofounder, Kaze Living that sells hydroponic vegetables in NCR. With limited access to supermarkets and ecommerce companies struggling with labour and curfew passes, a number of otherwise unknown fruit and vegetable sellers are stepping up across the country to fill the demand gap, and seeing a huge rise in demand for their products.They typically advertise heavily on social media platforms like Instagram to gain new customers during the lockdown and besides word of mouth publicity they use WhatsApp as their outreach platforms.
“A lot of our dormant customers came back. The demand will be here to stay for the next three months as more people will be staying in and not going out,” said Gauri Bhatnagar, cofounder, Earthy Tales, a year old company.
Given their small sizes, they often choose to filter their deluge of orders through referral customer sign-ups. Others have expanded their B2B businesses that they would run like Fruit Box & Co. They know a large chunk of their customers will fall off from their lists as soon as the lockdown is eased up. To go back to their B2B business is easy.Kaze Living works on referrals from chefs and their friends circle.
“Subscription gives us “predictability and forecastability,” said Bengaluru-based Akash K Sajith, CEO, Living Food Company.
“It is an opportunity of a lifetime for these businesses to induce trial from customers, and to make a business sustainable model. After this is over, there could be a reversion to the mean, in the sense that costs will go up as they’d have to spend on marketing and branding,” said Krishnan Ganesh, the Bengaluru-based serial entrepreneur and copromoter of online grocery service BigBasket.
But the neighbourhood kirana stores remain stiff competition. Official figures from the The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) say that during the lockdown over 40 lakh kirana stores were open across the country delivering key essentials. They are still responsible for 98% of the grocery consumption in the country.
Anurag Dalmia, cofounder of Healthy Buddha in Bengaluru, has seen 25-30% of his customers come back only through referrals. “VCs and PEs have been shy of investing in this segment, but online grocery shopping is here to stay and it will garner a lot of interest in the coming months,” Dalmia said.
Life beyond lockdown
However grateful they are for this Indian summer, most of these entrepreneurs also know that this is a brief window that will eventually close when the lockdown is lifted. “People will go back to buying from Amazon and Big-Basket, it’s a daily requirement, everyone has a thela wala in their colony,” said Mumbai’s Panthaky.
After the lockdown, Living Food Company plans to expand to Delhi and Mumbai. The company that saw 20% YOY growth rate has grown by 150% since pandemic started and claims to have spent nothing on marketing. Most companies harvesting this opportunity hope they can create a strong niche to compete with the bigger players when life returns to normal.
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