Grofers rebrands itself as Blinkit

PTI, Dec 13, 2021, 11:18 AM IST

New Delhi: Online grocery delivery platform Grofers on Monday said it is rebranding itself as ‘Blinkit’ to reflect its pivot to quick commerce.

The Zomato and SoftBank-backed company had started its quick commerce service with a 10-minute delivery promise a few months ago.

”A few months ago, we started on a journey to build the future of commerce with 10 minute delivery of most of the stuff our customers need in their daily lives… We learnt a lot as Grofers, and all our learnings, our team, and our infrastructure is being repurposed to pivot to something with staggering product-market fit – quick commerce,” Blinkit said in a blogpost.

The blogpost added that the company is already processing over a million orders a week, across 12 cities in India under the service.

”Today, we are surging ahead as a new company, and we have a new mission statement – ‘instant commerce indistinguishable from magic’. And we will no longer be doing this as Grofers – we will be doing it as Blinkit,” the blogpost noted.

Last month, Grofers had said it planned to open 150 dark stores by December, taking the total count to 350, for quick commerce to deliver orders in about 10 minutes. At that time, Grofers had said it had a 3 million monthly order run rate and had logged growth of 3.5 times in the last two months, while gaining one million quick commerce users.

While traditional e-commerce deliveries take a day or longer, quick commerce (or q-commerce) enables customers to get small quantities of goods to customers in a shorter period of time.

According to a RedSeer report, the quick commerce sector in India is expected to grow to USD 5 billion by 2025 from the current USD 0.3 billion.

Quick commerce is growing in India on the back of trends like a shift in consumer behaviour, entry of big players like BigBasket and Grofers, and rise of instant delivery platforms, as per the report.

Earlier this month, food delivery platform Swiggy had announced an investment of USD 700 million (about Rs 5,250 crore) in its express grocery delivery service, Instamart. Last month, Ola had also started piloting a quick delivery service for items like groceries in Bengaluru. Other players in the segment include the likes of Dunzo.