India’s online supermarket has forayed into offline retail by opening a technology-driven, self-service ‘Fresho’ store at Basaveshwar Nagar, Bengaluru.
The store was inaugurated by three farmers who are a part of bigbasket’s Farmer Connect program. The launch is part of the company’s vision to open 200 physical outlets pan India by 2023 and 800 by 2026.
The Stores will offer high-quality products at highly competitive prices. The initiative aims at targeting the next 500 million users who haven’t purchased groceries online yet.
The channel-agnostic approach
A digital-first brand, bigbasket has adopted a channel-agnostic approach to connect with customers.
With Fresho stores, customers can now handpick fresh fruits and vegetables and daily essentials like Bread and Eggs stocked at the store.
For accessing the company’s entire range of products, they will place the orders online and collect them at the Fresho Stores at their convenience.
Hari Menon, Co-Founder and CEO, bigbasket, said, “bigbasket has always striven to adopt a customer-first approach. This is where the ‘Fresho’ stores will be game-changers in terms of making the buying of fruits, vegetables and groceries as seamless as cash transactions at ATMs.”
“The stores will give access to the next 500 million customers who have not yet started buying grocery online and create a new significant growth opportunity for bigbasket. The produce stocked at the Stores is backed by our extensive Farmer Connect program where we partner with over 30,000 farmers across the country to source fruits and vegetables directly,” added Menon.
There is complete traceability for all fresh produce built-in our supply chain, which allows us to communicate details of the farmer for each product to our customers.”
About bigbasket
A TATA Enterprise, bigbasket is leading the online grocery market and has recently re-hauled its supply chains across cities to fulfill most customer orders faster.
The company’s operations have expanded to 40 cities in India and serve 12 million customer orders per month, and bigbasket’s differentiation lies in its supply chain integration for fresh fruits, vegetables and meats, and its private solid label brands.
In 2020, bigbasket reached the milestone of US$ 1 billion in annual revenues. The Fresho stores will merge the best of technology such as ‘Self-billing Counters’ integrated with video AI tools that enable customers to pick items of their choice and weigh them at the counter through automatic computer vision that can identify the items and generate bills accordingly.
Thus, there will be a completely seamless, convenient shopping experience for the buyers at the store.
